Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThese fragments I have shored against my ruins – T.S. Eliot
Do you care how you’re remembered?
No question for a polite dinner party, granted, which is why I skedaddle from such events. Where everyone’s pleasant, little gets said. I was bred to blather, never offend, focus equally on dinner partners to my left and right, glitter and be gay (in that adjective’s old sense), eschew controversial topics not to “rock the boat.” Boat-rockers were anarchists in the Temple of Manners, traitors to revered complacencies. Politics, religion, disease, sex, dread, money and mortality were among the topics eschewed.
A good lad I did as bid. I sort of enjoyed flirting – not unlike fishing – but the tedium tired. Blah-blah-blah – to what end? What interested me were the truths precluded, which one wasn’t permitted to probe. I once remarked to an ever-so-mannerly matron that we’d all die one day. She was shocked.
I think a lot about being dead. Why care since I won’t be conscious, you might ask. But can I count on unconsciousness? The makers I love are more alive posthumously than while they breathed. They’ve spun industries around them like moths their cocoons. Sub-sub-specialists in academe debate their choices. They’ve got fan clubs – and detractors. That’s unlikely to be me, I concede, but neither were Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, George Herbert or most of the denizens of Parnassus candidates for durable regard. “Dress for success” manuals coach. You can’t be too careful.
If my tomb gets discovered un-despoiled, like Tutankhamen’s, I mean to dazzle: my handsomest remains artfully arranged, an eye full. More practical, isn’t it, to charm my discoverer than some long-dead dinner partner? May my discoverer take me home and feed me like a stray kitten, eye my words and wonder, “What was he trying to say?”
Tutankhamen was a minor pharaoh – he died age eighteen – but posthumously he’s a rock star, thanks to his remains. (An early tennis coach quipped, “It’s better to be lucky than good.”) The time and wealth he spent shoring up his fragments paid off. I’m busy that way too. Daily I cudgel myself to make words better than their maker. That I’ll never reach the summit I glimpse enhances its allure.
My goal is nuts, but aren’t most? Saints aim for salvation – huh? The mediocre majority dream of a hearty welcome past the golden gates. Many the oldster who solaces themselves with the prospect of sighing scions (“You’ll miss me when I’m gone”). The tombs folks erect, the way names get pasted on buildings! Insanity – vanity of vanities – dog-pal Henry chuckles at our panic. Yet this longing for posthumous regard is commonplace. Visit any graveyard with its inscriptions.
I compose for now – with an eye cocked on eternity. And a good thing too. The desire to pass muster in the hereafter disinfects my conduct. Presently Jane and I are revisiting Robert Caro’s massive magisterial biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker. Few were as adulated in their hour. And along comes Robert Caro to unearth his subject’s hair-raising incriminating secrets. Yikes! Let me leave a legacy that can withstand even a Robert Caro’s scrutiny.
Is a focus on one’s futurity morbid? I’d argue the opposite. Readying myself for an eventual reckoning invigorates, youthens, thrills. I can’t wait to wake each morning to get to work. So (in my telling) were the Wise Men enlivened by that crazy star. “What is man but his passion?” wrote Robert Penn Warren. Or Robert Browning, in a different take on the same dynamic, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?”