View From the Tenth Level

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

There's one thing that goes with getting older that usually applies equally to men and women, and that is, thoughts of death. With the first major illness, the first bad car accident, sometimes, the first wrinkle or grey hair, you begin to realise that you won't live forever. Even Dick Clark, the "world's oldest teenager," is looking his age these days.

With getting older and thinking about one's own mortality, you start to wonder about what you're going to leave behind. What little bit of immortality are you leaving the world? Most of us die in obscurity and only have our descendents to remember us by, and once a couple of generations have passed, you won't have that any more either.

I am thinking that people achieve their greatest heights in an effort to be remembered long after they're gone. What better motivation than to create something so spectacular, that thousands who never even met you, remember you. Thomas Edison will never die. Neither will Adolph Hitler. Not really, as long as they are remembered in some way.

I would have liked to have created something spectacular in my lifetime: recorded a hit record, painted a work of art so beautiful that people weep when they see it, written a best-selling book that becomes a classic, had someone duplicate my likeness in marble. But it hasn't happened yet.

I am, what the writer Henry David Thoreau said, living a "life of quiet desperation." Man is unfortunate in the animal kingdom, in that he recognises his own mortality. Other animals may sense it, and hence their fight for survival, but only man knows it as a certainty and has developed mythologies to comfort himself.

Melanie O.

And so, I am faced with this unholy prospect of obscurity when I am gone. I suppose I may fertilize some grass somewhere, which then may be eaten by a wild rabbit, which in turn may feed a fox and gain me a few extra years on this planet, even if it's in another consciousness. But ultimately, life is short and we are all too soon forgotten. I have struggled with knowing that my legacy to the earth is a poor one, and have had to come to terms with the fact that, like so many others before me and since, I am a bigger consumer than I am a creator.

Here's where someone is supposed to point out to me that I have created the most beautiful of all things: children. And, in truth, I have four handsome and lovely sons who have given me the highest and lowest points of my life. If, as Thoreau says: "In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident," then I will be immortal in this truth. I have four sons. They will pass on my genetic material for as long as nature and happenstance allow it.

In the meantime, I will continue to model lingerie and be the subject of pinup photography and someone's artistic sketches. Perhaps, in a hundred years, in someone's attic, they will discover an old photo or sketch of a woman who looks remarkably like I do now. And they'll wonder: who is this woman? And what was her life like? And did she have a family? And I will be shouting to them from the grave, even if they can't hear me.

posted by Melanie O. at 6:26 PM -

2 Comments:

At 1:55 PM, Anonymous said…

Melanie,
You should be remembered for your wonderful Retro site created with great imagination and energy. Your openess of heart and healthy attitude towards sex appeal will be remembered as long as there are free and un-censored electronic bits floating through the networks of time.
At 7:56 PM, Melanie O. said…

Thanks, Don...
Your comments are very much appreciated. :-)