Perhaps because as much as I’d like to regard myself as middle-aged, I’d have to live to be 133 years old for that to be anything but a pipe dream, I’ve been wondering lately if anything I’ve ever written will stand the test of time. When I concluded that in all likelihood, nothing would, I have to admit I quickly went through the four stages of grief. I forget the order in which I experienced them, but denial, anger, and depression, were all there, and at the blissful end, acceptance.
Heck, I’ll be dead, for crying out loud! What difference will it make to me what people are reading? I’ll be far more concerned with whether or not I’ll be able to get cable and a corned beef sandwich wherever it is I wind up.
Besides, I concluded, just because writing lives on doesn’t mean a whole lot. I mean, it’s one thing if it’s Shakespeare or the Bible, but a lot of famous lines are nothing but high-sounding claptrap.
For instance, one of the most famous lines in poetry is T.S. Eliot’s “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.” Blah blah blah. It means absolutely nothing. He might as well have reversed things and suggested it doesn’t end with a whimper, but with a bang. At least that would have been a little snappy. But what would you expect of a snob who was so put out about being born in St. Louis that he went so far as to run off and become an English citizen? And then, for good measure, he wrote a book of poems about cats!
Or consider George Santayana. His claim to immortality is that he’s the philosopher who wrote “Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Granted, it’s a slightly better line than Eliot’s, but it’s just as meaningless. The fact of the matter is that there are a limited number of options for individuals and nations. So, whether or not you remember what’s come before, whatever happens will be a repeat of something that’s already taken place. And human nature being human nature, whatever that something is will probably raise a lot of dust and frighten the farm animals.
Then we have Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher who, typically, lacked a sense of humor. He also lacked even a lick of common sense. Frankly, I think if he hadn’t managed to pass himself off as a philosopher, he would have been written off as a run-of-the-mill crank. This is the shmoe who wrote: “Truthfulness in statements which can not be avoided is the formal duty of an individual to everyone, however great may be the disadvantage accruing to himself or to another.”
I take “statements that can not be avoided” to mean answers to direct questions. That hardly leaves a lot of wiggle room for people being interrogated by Nazis, Islamic terrorists, the KGB, or suspicious spouses. It should come as no surprise that Kant was a life-long bachelor. Imagine the schnook giving honest answers to “Immanuel, does my new dress make me look fat?” “Immanuel, do you ever think about that hussy you used to go with?” “Immanuel, whose strudel do you prefer? Mine or your mother’s?” I guarantee there’s no way that man would have lived to be 80 years old.
I’m not trying to suggest that nothing written in the distant past is worth quoting. Rarely, in fact, does a day go by when I don’t have reason to recall Mark Twain’s observation: “If you do not read a newspaper, you will be uninformed. If you do read it, you will be misinformed.”
It just occurred to me that my words will outlast me even if I manage to somehow make it all the way to 133. I wrote for “M*A*S*H,” you see, and so long as there are people who can’t get their fill of Hawkeye’s wisecracks, my words are destined to live on through all of eternity.
