Momus has been watching Super 8 home movies:

“I’ve been watching these movies in tandem with The Private Life of Plants, the David Attenborough TV series from 1995. Trees, of course, can live hundreds of years. Watching humans, in comparison, is like watching something speeded up, fleeting. We’re born, we reproduce, we die. We’re gone in a flash; there’s a yellow flare, some numbers, some leader and the spool runs off the bobbin.”

Lovely.