XVIII

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

It's the last two lines that really get me, aside from the whole fleeting impermanence of summer beauty, which is both ironic in a place like miami, which actually is warm and summer-like all year round, and apt, in that I am leaving this place in a day, and will be officially off vacation and back on the hard but enjoyable work of learning.

Those last two lines hold the key to longevity far beyond the span of a normal human life. Think of those ancient writers like Plato, Homer, and the unknown writers of the Ramayana and the Edda's (the stories about the Norse Gods) for all the different cultures. The people (and perhaps gods) in those stories live on, long after their body has ceased to be. Your words, like Willy's up there, can live on and gain notoriety far beyond anything you had when living. Van Gough's paintings sold for a pittance, if they sold at all, while he was alive.

But it has to be great, whatever it is you do, if you want to live on. Otherwise it's lost into the mass of others long before you die.

There's something called Achilles Dilemma, after the hero of the Iliad. The story goes (to the best of my memory) that when Achilles was young man, one of the gods came to him and presented him with two options: either he could live a quiet, long, happy life, with a wonderful family, and be forgotten with the death of his grandchildren, or he could have a short, extremely traumatic, life, and be remembered by people forever.

And which would you choose? Maharishi, a dear teacher of mine through is books and tapes, was asked once, "how would you like to be remembered?" to which he replied something like, "why would I want to be remembered at all?"

IO