Footnote

a The Watchtower once made this insightful comment: “We should not waste this life on vanities . . . If this life is all there is, there is nothing important. This life is like a ball thrown into the air that soon falls into the dust again. It is a fleeting shadow, a fading flower, a blade of grass to be cut and soon withered. . . . On the scales of eternity our life span is a negligible speck. In the stream of time it is not even a healthy drop. Certainly [Solomon] is right when he reviews life’s many human concerns and activities and pronounces them vanity. We are so soon gone we might as well have never come, one of billions to come and go, with so few ever knowing we were here at all. This view is not cynical or somber or morose or morbid. It is truth, a fact to face, a practical view, if this life is all there is.”—August 1, 1957, page 472.