In the proverb ‘These things are sent to try us’, the word things expands like Mary Poppins's handbag to contain possibilities of every possible size: a hiccup, a strong gust of wind, a hurricane, global warming. Proverbs such as this one might at first ring hollow because what is being said can change so drastically (mild indigestion or environmental degradation at an unprecedented scale) even as the form remains remain exactly the same: ‘These things are sent to try us.’ But proverbs are clearly not hollow. Proverbs are forms of speech that point towards a content that is, in some fundamental sense, elsewhere (e.g. a shared language or knowledge gathered in other contexts) or, we might say, elsewhen (e.g. knowledge that is outside of chronology, or from another time). Following Craig Dionne, who studies Hamlet's criticism of Osric's stultifying use of commonplace, I see proverbs as ‘yeasty’—they are not insignificant, they grow into things that are ‘more than the sum of [their] parts’. More specifically in this chapter, I advance the argument that proverbs function within a system of what Timothy Morton calls hyperobjects, that is, things that are ‘massively distributed in time and space’, ‘viscous’ and ‘nonlocal’, and which ‘involve profoundly different temporalities than the human ones we are used to’.