This phrase, from the Tillie Olsen short story Tell Me A Riddle, came spontaneously into my head the other day. I can't remember what I was doing, but it was nothing that should have called such words to mind.

I had no idea what the words meant when I first read them years ago. When I thought of them the other day, I suddenly realized they're about the memory of the dead, which is a form of immortality, in the consciousnesses of the living. As the living die, their memories are extinguished.

In the Tillie Olsen short story, the dead character is a young child, remembered with the greatest poignancy by his aged, terminally ill mother. In fact, the-living-taking-the-dead-with-them is a universal principle.

People who have money build big grave monuments for themselves and their loved ones, but as anyone who's walked around an old cemetery knows, the most ostentatious grave-plots crumble in a matter of decades into ruin. In time, there's nobody to leave flowers in memory of the departed, anymore. There's no incentive anywhere to maintain the memorial that was once planned so carefully and cost somebody so much.

If you're typical, if you do nothing in your life to achieve lasting notoriety, you can expect to be completely forgotten 50, at the most, 75 years after your death. There should be nobody around by then who thinks of you, except perhaps as an entry in a genealogical record.

For some interesting reason, besides the Tillie Olsen, I have also been recalling snippets from Kurt Vonnegut. I don't know why. The two sources could not appear to be more wildly incongruous, with each other, or with anything else that's going on in my life at the moment.

I don't recall which novel, but there's a marvelous parody of a fictitious American president talking about the role of manufacturing in the American economy. He relates an anecdote about the furniture trade and the "chairs in the warehouse," which he pronounces "chires in the wirehouse."
8:32:14 PM    comment []