- BecauseSheSaidSo:
- I'm honestly not too sure about if I would want to be remembered after death. I feel like it is nearly impossible.
I'm reading The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius right now for my AP English class, and in it Lady Philosophy explains that everyone dies two deaths. The first death is physical, taking your last breath. The second death is when all thoughts of you are lost, when you are no longer remembered.
That sounds super depressing, and I'm not sure if I believe it entirely, but I just thought it was interesting.
I've heard of that before and it depresses the hell out of me, and in a way, I think I believe it because once your loved ones have passed on, there's nothing else, really. I think eventually, we're all forgotten over time and it could easily be like a second death.
I think my faint desire to be remembered after I die is almost natural because I'm a writer. Even when you're dead, your writing is out there somewhere and it might get buried, but it's out there and someone might remember it or someone might find it and fall in love with it or at least know it's out there, and know of you. I don't want to be remembered because I wrote a "classic" or anything; I don't want to be like Sylvia Plath or someone else. I just want my writing to be out there when I die so there's a sliver of hope that I'm remembered when I'm gone and my loved ones are no longer around to talk about me. But I'm also an idealist so I'm not sure how realistic that might be.
But truthfully, deep down, I still believe we're all eventually forgotten. As the years go by, I think the memory will be too buried underneath everything else to truly exist. I think one day, William Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath and H.P. Lovecraft will be forgotten underneath the memories of more recent authors. So even though we remember them now, decades later, that doesn't mean we always will—we'll stop hearing about them in school and they'll stop being a "need-to-know" subject; their wording and writing style will be outdated and pointless to teach and they'll fade away, replaced by other authors. Books like
To Kill a Mockingbird and
Catcher in the Rye will all eventually be forgotten. It'll take a long time, but it's going to happen. Authors from our times will be the new classic writers; books we read and adored when we were teenagers will be taught to teenagers many generations from now instead of Shakespeare or Plath or Robert Frost because the language will die and no longer be appreciated, therefore no longer taught. And like everything else, it'll be forgotten.
So I'm not sure what to believe. It's been decades and decades since some of what we consider "classics" were written and they're still remembered, but for how much longer? It can't be forever; nothing lasts forever. I think writing keeps us alive longer than we can possibly be physically. The idealist and romantic in me wants to believe that there's ways to be remembered long after death, but the pessimistic (and possibly realistic) side of me
knows we're all forgotten eventually, no matter the footprint we've left on the world. There's always going to be someone that does it better, introduces something new, and overthrows what we think will forever be remembered.
I think the only thing that'll ever be remembered are the wars of the world and the destruction we've caused such as the cities we've built and the lands we've ruined because we're an aggressively controlling and sad species.