universe event

A "universe event" occured to me yesterday.
I didn't know they even could happen to people over 20.
Everybody knows the earth they stand on is a tiny tiny pebble suspended in an immense expending void. But then comes the one night when looking up at the stars you suddenly feel the distances, the infinity of it (infinite, for human purposes). You understand the whole story, what it really means. That's what what I call a universe event. That gap.
That one came after a sentence by John Berger:
"any lifetime is absurdly short compared to the longevity of memory."
And it dawned to me, like a dawn, like a real dawn, that memory is not only a shared experience, but a shared faculty. Everybody, man and animal, has his own memory, personal and mortal, but they all connect to build the other, bigger memory, transmitted by learning and images and words, DNA . Mortal too, killable, yes, but the longevity.
You have always known it. Yeah, me too.
Wow.

(this is one of the things that make species extinction so terrible. The ending of a strain of memory, running out in the sand).