William Butler Yeats’ epitaph is his own lines “Cast a cold eye/On life and death,/Horseman, pass by.” Remember Kathleen Kennedy, JFK’s sister who married an English nobleman and was killed in a plane crash? I’ve always liked her epitaph “Joy she gave, joy she has.” I also like Cecil Day-Lewis’ own epitaph “Shall I be gone long?” Robert Frost suggested for his epitaph “He had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” And Dorothy Parker suggested “Excuse my dust.” Benjamin Franklin’s epitaph is lines he wrote when he was young:
The Body of B. Franklin, Printer
Like the Cover of an old Book
Its contents torn out,
And stript of its Lettering and Guilding,
Lies here, Food for Worms,
But the Work shall not be wholly lost:
For it will, as he believ’d,
Appear once more
In a new & more perfect Edition,
Corrected and amended by the Author.
I think I’d like a Chinese-style “tree burial,” where they cremate you then plant a tree over your ashes. If they want to put up an inscription plaque it should be the Chinese proverb “Our ancestors planted trees, we sit in the shade.”
Our other subject this week is “Losing all your marbles.” Just now I’m reading Alexandre Dumas’ mega-novel The Count of Monte Cristo. It’s about a guy who gets framed and becomes a political prisoner for fourteen years. Then he makes an incredible escape and finds a huge treasure. Eventually he sets about getting even with the people who got him sent up. He does that by cleverly manipulating things so that they ultimately destroy themselves! The worst of his enemies has the worst fate, going insane in the end. You’re bound to wonder, Is what the hero does to him worse than what he did? In one of the Kill Bill movies, the Japanese sword-maker warns a vengeful Uma Thurman, “You may think of revenge as a road, but it’s more like a forest.” That movie came out about the same time as 9/11, which prompted a pretty rash vengeance campaign by the American government…
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