Ecclesiastes 1:11

There is no remembrance of former things Better, of former men, or of those of old time, and so in the next clause of those that shall come after. The thought of the oblivion of the past, suggested in the previous verse, as explaining the fact that some things seem new to us which are not so, is reproduced in another aspect as yet a new element in the pessimism into which the writer has fallen. Men dream of a fame that shall outlive them. How few of those that went before them do they remember even by name? How little do they know even of those whose names have survived amid the wreck that has engulfed others? What does it profit to be famous now, just known by name to the generation that follows, and then forgotten altogether? Comp. a striking passage to the same effect in Jeremy Taylor's Contemplations of the State of Man, ch. 3, "The name of Echebar was thought by his subjects to be eternal, and that all the world did not only know but fear him; but ask here in Europe who he was, and no man hath heard of him; demand of the most learned, and few shall resolve you that he reigned in Magor," and Marc. Aurel. Meditt. ii. 17, ἡ ὑστεροφημία, λήθη, "posthumous fame is but oblivion." So ends the prologue of the book, sounding its terrible sentence of despair on life and all its interests. It is hardly possible to turn to the later work, which also purports to represent the Wisdom of Solomon, without feeling that its author deliberately aimed at setting forth another aspect of things. He reproduces well-nigh the very words of the prologue, "the breath of our nostrils is as smoke" … "our name shall be forgotten in time: our life shall pass away as the trace of a cloud" … but he puts all this into the mouth not of his ideal Solomon but of "ungodly men, … reasoning with themselves but not aright," Wis 2:1-5, and shews how it leads first to sensuous self-indulgence, and then to deliberate oppression, and persistent antagonism to God. (See Introduction, chap. v.)