So Eddie is always asking me to tell him a story "about a human being." I have to really cudgel my brains to come up with something these days. So during dinner, when a story was demanded, I told him about Ozymandias, a king who had a huge statue of himself built, and wrote on the bottom "I am Ozymandias, king of kings: look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" But then time went on, the desert overtook the land, the statue crumbled apart, yada yada, and just the pedestal was left.
Then when people saw it, they were like "What works? Pfft, Ozymandias was pretty silly."
Eddie didn't buy it. "Why were the words still there?" he asked.
"Just the pedestal was left", I said.
"If the whole statue crumbled away, why were the words still there?"
Well, that's a pretty good question, now that you mention it!
So it begins! Many years of wonderful questions you won't know how to answer!
ReplyDeleteIndeed, a question to devote a lifetime to pondering. Words, unlike sticks and stones, are insubstantial, ephemeral, and yet in the long run sticks and stones disintegrate and crumble while words and the ideas they evoke somehow linger, and thus become the pedestals of our lives and our communities.
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