The Fourth Circle: Greed (Canto XVI)

O beings blind! what ignorance

Besets you? Now my judgment hear and mark.

He, whose transcendent wisdom passes all,

The heavens creating, gave them ruling powers
To guide them, so that each part shines to each,

Their light in equal distribution pour'd.

By similar appointment he ordain'd

Over the world's bright images to rule.

Canto XVI

"'My name is Ozymandias, 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."

Percy Shelley, Ozymandias

No matter how influential we are in our lives, no matter what monuments we erect in our honor, nothing is eternal, and everything subject to the entropic influence of time. No matter how we try, the influence we hold over the earth is finite. We shall remain ever mortal, ever impotent to a true transcendence our native limitations.

If we construct an empire, the empire will fall. If we bear children, our children's children will forget our name. If we write a treatise that greatly impacts our cultural ethos and the minds of generations to come, there will still come a day when our work is lost forever to the sands of time. For it is not merely a person that is mortal, but so too their monuments. Whole civilizations have come into being, flourished and thrived, and dissolved back unto dust without so much as a single memory enduring past their history. Everything we achieve is subject to the fatal indifference of time.

How are we to cope with the knowledge of our infinitesimal smallness? Shall we endeavor to live our lives wholly in the certain present, shirking forever our desire for immortality? Are we to simply resign ourselves from the quest for a lasting influence on our world? Even with the knowledge of our own mortality, should we not still concern ourselves with the future and what shall come for the generations of humankind yet unborn?

Being aware of one's own smallness does not have to mean abandoning the quest for permanence. This awareness is not meant to prevent us from looking toward the future, but only to avoid the all too pervasive delusion that we are more lasting, more capable, and more powerful than we are.

How are we to modify our various quests for permanence so as to reflect the awareness of their futility? How are we to build authentically, knowing full well that whatever we erect shall inevitably fall? Each of our creations shall require a different approach in accordance with its nature. Knowing all stones shall become sand and return to dust, our buildings should be raised in accommodation with their inevitable dissolution. Knowing how unpredictable the choices of every human are, our families should grow with an endemic confidence placed in whatever legacy our children determine for themselves.

What of literature? Can we write upon parchment destined to dust? One of the goals of writing is to create something that persists past one's own time. In writing, we acknowledge how fleeting our reality is, seeking to find within it that which is true and lasting, that we may capture it in a moment for preservation and posterity. The text may be lost and our name forgotten, if but the essence of its truth is preserved and disseminated into the greater culture, then the intention of the work has been achieved. For the author, in his total submission to the muses, forsakes his ego that he may curry favor with the divine custodians of the truth, and become the vessel by which a greater being may speak. The author rejects idle self-indulgence, caring not for the preservation of his name in the annals of history, giving instead his every all for that which stands eternally outside of time.

The principle aims of an author are twofold: to create something beautiful, and to say something true. Sometimes an author succeeds in only one of these two aims, yielding something beautiful yet frivolous, or something meaningful yet rough and unpolished. Accomplishing only one of these aims is good enough for the present, but those works which persist in their influence century after century are those which excel in both.

Does the aim for lasting beauty and truth run contrary to the fact of our mortality? Perhaps not. Perhaps that which allows a literary work to become timeless is the very same as that which gives it value in the present. If not for the truth and beauty of the works of Shakespeare, they would not have been as popular in his time, nor as revered in ours. It was the same truth that resonated with the English peasantry that resonates still with us; the same beauty that captivated the English gentry that captivates us still. For it is within the presence of the forever fleeting moment that eternity is unveiled.