Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time watching the living and the dead. London is an excellent place to observe either, or both. Like all very old cities, it’s more graveyard than metropolitan centre, since more people have died and been buried here than are currently living in the place.
In graveyards and on headstones, I see that, for the most part, all our desperate efforts to express ourselves as individuals and make our marks upon the world come to nothing, with the passage of time. Poor Mr. Owen was probably a proud, upstanding man in life: he attempted to be a good father, a decent husband. Perhaps he tried his best to provide for his family, and gain the respect of his peers, but look at him now:
I sit at sidewalk cafes – because you can’t smoke inside – and watch the living go by. Men and women all, whether consciously or unconsciously, trying to mean something. The badly cut suit of a young man on his way to a job he hopes will be a stepping stone to something better. The garish, plum-coloured hair of a plump, middle aged woman who doesn’t want to become invisible to a society that can no longer find her sexually desirable. An old man’s carefully brushed hat, his unsteady hand on a walking cane, as he stands in line at the Tesco. The multi-coloured tattoos and twinkling piercings of a young girl who has decided to use her own body as her artist’s canvas, since she can’t draw.
We don’t want to be nothing. We don’t want to be ants in the hive. We want to matter. But time doesn’t let us.
Even those to whom history has been kind. The names we remember as figures of statesmanship, history, literature, art, industry… we don’t remember them. We know some simplified, stylised caricature of them. We don’t feel their breath on our skin, or hear their dream-induced utterances in the night. We don’t smell the perfume they chose, or smile at the way their tie is knotted slightly askew. All the simple truth of them is lost.
Time will make a mockery of all our efforts. So, I have to ask myself why, knowing this so surely, I still insist on typing words on the page, as if in some vain attempt to claw a little piece of immortality for myself?
Perhaps because this is who we are – the only species doomed to fail at what we care most to achieve: we want to be seen for who we are, known for what we are, loved for being ourselves.
Do you have hopes of being remembered? How do you hope to be remembered?
How transient we are, insignificant in every mean. Perhaps anything only holds meaning with mortality. Immortality would surely be a curse were we to attain it, apart from immortality in memory