Memorial
This sparkofinsight is spotty. It’s disorganized. Alot of thoughts without elaboration.
A flurry of sparks that extinguish in the blink of an eye.
The burial of the dead is the earliest form of memorial in human history.
Thousands of years ago, before the rise of civilization, before the gears of human ingenuity began to turn, humankind understood memory. They understood, at our core, we are beings who want to be remembered, and it took not the power of steel or the thunder of engines to reach such a conclusion. Men and women who knew almost nothing about the world understood a fundamental value: memorial.
Memory of us lasts so long as our body endures. Our lives are spent scratching and clawing to be remembered, scavenging for hope in the brevity of our lives.
Our fear is that we are useless. Our fear is that our lives have been wasted. For good or for bad, we want to be remembered. That’s how we become immortal.
Remembrance is our duty as a race, as a world culture. No one deserves to be forgotten, and our mental maps must be complete. But memory is our fatal flaw. Our imperfect brains forget just as easily as they remember. Our works, just as our bodies, crumble in the passage of time.
“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
– Ozymandias by Percy Shelley
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