I don't get to quote Vladimir Nabokov that often, and I'm not sure if he came up with the line himself, or heard it somewhere else, but this morning, I'm in a ruminative frame of mind, where if I recall it correctly, (I doubt it), he said something like this: "our lives are but a brief moment of light, bookended by great immensities of darkness." Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure he didn't say it exactly like that, I'm just "recreating," but, that was the basic formulation.
This time of year seems to be a validation of the point. The interval of light between darknesses is brief. A day or so ago, I saw the sun dancing in the clouds and it looked very "moon-like" - small, pale-white (A whiter shade of pale?). Darkness decends early, and lifts late. So above, as below... A day is a mirror to a life, a life is a mirror to a world, a world is a mirror to a universe, a universe is a mirror...to what?