I came across the following quote from John Dewey a long time ago, but I've been thinking a lot about it lately. Here it is.

When we have used our thought to its utmost and have thrown into the moving unbalanced balance of things our puny strength, we know that though the universe slay us still we may trust, for our lot is one with whatever is good in existence. We know that such thought and effort is the condition of the coming into the existence of the better. As far as we are concerned it is the only condition, for it alone is in our power.

I think it's the phrase "unbalanced balance of things" that sticks with me just as must as the Job reference. It suggests, I think, that odd feeling that our lives are out of sorts. That we're weighing down only one side of the scale, rather than both, and that the larger "balance" isn't ours to see or to feel, but belongs to the universe alone. We are only a part of it, and perhaps apart from it. Parts of a whole we can't see.

It's something I often come back to. Stanley Cavell says that "the universe exists for its own reasons"--not ours. How do you embrace this wisdom without nihilism, without wanting to surrender? It's been suggested that human beings, and all life, exist so that the universe may observe itself. We are means to that end. That is to say that what we see, what we feel, are not simply phantoms of our minds but real properties of the universe that realize themselves through us. There is dignity in this. And it suggests that the meaning we feel, the importance of our own lives, is real too, and not merely confined to petty "human" affairs.

So the universe may exist for its own reasons, but we contribute to those reasons. And the infinite depths of feeling that we seem to be capable of, that sadness or joy, isn't just stuck isolated in your head. It's part of the world.