“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.“
John Keats
Keats asked that these words be engraved on his tombstone. A star among the Romantic poets, he burned brief and bright and then died at the age of 25 from tuberculosis.
What are the things writ in water? Our names, our reputations, our actions; certainly, the things we write; everyone we know, everything we can see and touch in the material world. Scientists tell us that even the Earth will someday end her spiraling course across the heavens and collapse into the sun. Caesar, Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Elizabeth I – their names will be forgotten too.
But those are things written at the surface. Water is deep. A pebble dropped might fall forever, silent as a feather. And it is in the depths that the world is continually recreated.
Read a Keats poem and you are affected in some small way, if only for an instant, even if you don’t like it. Its presence has disrupted an atom of the mind. The same is true for every thought, action, or aspiration of you and me. Beneath the physical, the energy of a kind word or loving gesture ripples out, shaping the fiber of the universe like the grain of living wood. Cruel and selfish acts too, but their brittle force has far less power. Consciousness is a field, and we are all plowing furrows that run on and on.
What remains when my life is done? My body will die, of course, and my name will be forgotten, along with Caesar and Keats. Obvious but irrelevant. This does not change the core of who I am or why I make the choices I do. I’m part of a longer stream running below the surface, adding to the world’s recreation.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness…
John Keats
Photo by Nazym Jumadilova on Unsplash