I often pass an old cemetery while commuting on the train to Waterloo. It used to pass my periphery only briefly but now I watch it purposely as it passes by - I don't know why but the whole concept, it intrigues me me now.
It makes me think of timespan. Entire lives, lives already spent. Makes me think of the countless people before me that have live entire lifetimes already.
Those that have have been dead for countless more life times since them even. Its is a long time when you think about it.
A life time is a long time.
You can do so much in a life time, surely.
To think that there are series-upon-series of back-to-back lives lived before yours, one right after the other, years and years spent. When you consider that a lifetime is the longest thing that you'll ever have - my appreciation of time in general increases somewhat.
Perhaps a long lifetime is 70 years or more. What does one do with that much time? It all ends, like its destined to, these tombstones are testament of it. And I wonder, perhaps are that these tombstones best to be seen as monuments to these life times? Dedications to lives spent? Is that all? And it intrigues me: What was the outcome of those lives?
An intriguing question because surely with so much time spent, everyone should have done something worth all that time? Surely a lifetime spent must result to something useful? Something worth mentioning, perhaps even remembering. It just remembering that you lived enough? Is getting though life enough, getting through the teenage years - experiencing love, loss, excitement, embarrassment and achievement throughout our lives - is that testament enough to a life lived? Are some of these tombstones only testament to this? A lifetime's duration is worth the experiences encountered, the lessoned learned, but is it all lost when you die? Are these personal achievements in your life worth anything after you die. Who will benefit from your ability as a teenager to overcome an anxiety of public speaking, who will find your ability to run faster than your classmates - who will cherish your ability to woe girls on the dance floor? The question seems that all these lifelong accomplishments serve no one, but oneself and are all lost in death. The real question is what isn't lost on your death and who does it benefit other than yourself(before death) and others( on death?)
Sitting in the park, writing on a keyboard, listening to passing conversations, seeing different colours, thinking different thoughts - is that all lost?
In a way I suppose it is - some things you cannot represent all of the time - the sensation of the cold on the back of your hand or how they approaching ambling goose makes you feel as it draws nearer as it plucks at the grass at its feet.
All these things cannot be captured all the time - these things die with you. It could be said that this witness-able time in your life, is only really witness-able to you. Perhaps you could write a poem about it. But you can't write a poem about everything all the time.
And it makes me wonder - why do we die, if its all lost? Why do we experience life?
If its not lost, perhaps ultimately its only lost to everyone else, to you its the effects of these events that define a person to become what he or she will ultimately become?
Will these define you, the person who will lie under 10 feet of soil ultimately? So not a loss to you, perhaps - but you die and surely its lost to you?
Tombstones seem so limiting, so inadequate - a lifetime surely should not be represented by stone, perhaps its fitting that stone outlasts you.
The final resting places of Lord Nelson, Achilles, Thomas Edison are not important, neither is Socrates or Leonardo Davinci and countless other great people.
These are arguably lives well spent and yet nothing is empty about them - I am satisfied with their 70+ years spend on earth and their contributions.
I wonder about the rest.
I have mixed emotions about those that were and are now arent, that don't have great stories, that seem only to have tombstones - to represent their lifetimes...
How unfortunate that these lives are not better represented.
Why didn't they write about their experiences, why didn't they leave a legacy - why compress a lifetimes work into a stone monument?
Perhaps this is a too narrow a view of a life? A dead soldier, a caring mother - all mean more than a tombstone to others that remember them.
Yet when those who do remember eventually die. This seems like a tragic loss.
Achilies wanted to have his story told for years and years - perhaps he felt a lifetime' story lost is terrible.
But what of the dead? Are they just memories now, and then nothing afterwards?