[b]Tom Stoppard
I extract significance from melodrama, a significance which it does not in fact contain; but occasionally, from out of this matter, there escapes a thin beam of light that, seen at the right angle, can crack the shell of mortality.[/b]
Or at least put a dent in it?
Death is the ultimate negative.
Or, for some, life.
…the natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. Strangely enough it all works out in the end…it’s a mystery.
Unless, strangely enough, it’s not.
An artist is the magician put among men to gratify–capriciously–their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist’s touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships–and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes–husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer…
You know, if that matters to you.
We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.
You know, if that matters to you.
It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
Indeed, in this day and age, it’s all but mandatory.