"Everyone must leave something behind when
he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a
wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand
touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people
look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.
It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from
the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you
take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a
real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well
not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.” (Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451)
The ancient
Egyptians thought that to speak the name of the dead was to bring them to life
again in the after-world. So for them,
and it would seem the majority of humankind, creating a lasting memory in this
life was rather essential to your continued spiritual existence in the next.
Certainly we
leave behind us, most of us, memories in the hearts of those whom we have come
in contact with. But such personal
memory can only survive for a few generations at best. Eternal memory is something else, an attainment
much more elusive and rare.
There seem to
be really only two ways of doing this; by Creation or Destruction, i.e., Love
or Hate
We have the
evidence that it is accomplishable; philosophers, writers, dictators, artists, assassins;
all the assorted peopling of history and humanities. But really, how many of us can reasonably
aspire to such?
And ought we
to? The remembrance we aspire too may not be what we get. After all, we know
memory changes with the telling and retelling of the tale until the persona of
the after-life may be unrecognizable compared to the living and breathing being
that once existed. So even a good life
can be vilified in death, and a bad one made noble. Such a life after death
then, if it does exist, may not be anything like what we imagine it.
It seems to
me, living now in this world, that all we can strive to do is honor the work of
our hands by giving the best possible effort we have, share in some form the
thoughts we acquire and create as a responsibility to those that follow, and to
never fail to passionately and verbally acknowledge the love we bear to the few
in our lives accepting of it. These are
the gifts we can give, that will have lasting relevance.
The
alternative is to kill and destroy as much and as violently as possible, and/or
to consume every possible asset of nature and man as widely and flamboyantly as
we can. i.e., “Live wild, die young, leave a pretty corpse” (Too late for that
now, anyway)
By continuously
encouraging the growth and happiness of those we come in contact with, even in
the everyday interactions with strangers, perhaps we may pique, albeit a short,
but hopefully a fond, memory. That, for me would seem enough. With that accomplishment I would be content
to accept a nameless eternity . . .