-
Life Preservers
- Syracuse University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
270 Life Preservers He kept a fleet of Rolls Royce classic cars garaged like special stallions in a single stable. Because Elizabeth the queen had ridden in one, he had the ride remembered on a plaque of silver mounted on the dash. That’s not as random as it sounds. For memory’s sake we treasure photographs, inscriptions, letters ribboned in a box and etchings on defiant tombstones. It’s called commemoration. Or do we mean perpetuation—if not in perpetuity, then part way there at least? But what’s the point? What’s gone stays gone. Trying to preserve it only shows we’re aching to reclaim a part of us that vanished with it. What good are epitaphs? To dedicate an airport to a President means nothing to the airport. Mountains that we’ve named for Pike, McKinley, or George Everest would look the same unnamed. In one millennium the names will fade or change, the photographs turn pale, the letters and inscriptions 271 decompose, and all the etchings blur and crumble into rubble like the pyramids. Why not accept our final legacy as air? Not air, but breath. Not breath, but sounds we make from breath. Not sounds, but words that find their way from speech to pages in a book as proof that words are all that lasts to say that nothing lasts but words. Blind Homer sang his poems seven hundred years before the birth of Christ. They sing today in every tongue on earth plus Braille. And all those sung or spoken words were spun from air—just air. ...