Doing Things

Let’s face it: other than after 5:30 p.m., when I surrender myself to the intellectual wonderland of television, I am incapable of relaxing. Totally incapable.

This morning I went to coffee with friends. We arrived at 10:30, as we always do, and by 11:15 I was champing at the bit to…well, go! To move! To not sit still another moment…as I always am. I am frequently rather concerned that my friends think I am bored with their company, but hope they realize by now that this isn’t the case. I just can’t not be doing something I can at least fool myself into thinking is constructive.

This afternoon I wrote a bit, though I am aware that I am dragging my feet on my book-in-progress and not writing nearly as much as I should every day. I wrote and responded to emails, read a bit on a book I’d been trying to get to for weeks now, went back to my own book, then moved on to several games of solitaire, becoming increasingly antsy with every action. Finally I just chucked it all and sit here composing another little guided tour through the workings of a very disorganized mind.

What is bothering me, and bothers me every time I find myself in this situation, is that every second I am not doing something I consider constructive, something that will leave some trace of me after I am gone, is a moment lost for all eternity. And I am agonizingly aware of the fact that time is running out. My death is not, I hope, imminent, but it is inevitable and no matter how many years may be ahead of me, they cannot be as many as are behind me. So I scratch and scribble and scrawl and type in an attempt to leave a trail of breadcrumbs through the corridors of time hoping someone, somewhere, someday, may follow them back to realize that this one little man with a desperate need to be remembered existed in their past just as they exist in their present.

I take Dylan Thomas’ words very much to heart: “Do not go gentle into that good night.” I have no intention of doing so. And I have the mental image of a small boy…I leave it to you to imagine who that small boy might be…, wearing a crown cut from posterboard and carrying a cardboard sword, wrapped in a large bath-towel cape, bravely marching forward to battle the demons of reality.

And I am fully aware that reality is not so much Dylan Thomas’s advice but the final image of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandius, which I am excessively fond of quoting:

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

But I believe with all my heart and soul that what matters is not that one inevitably loses the battle of life, but rather that one has loved life enough to fight for it to the end.

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