Ozzie ruled...

There are at least two ways to interpret Shelley's sonnet Ozymandias, which tells the story of a statue—or rather, of parts of a statue—of Ramesses II found lying in the desert with nothing much else around, with the following inscribed on the statue's pedestal:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

The first thing that comes to my mind is the excellent joke played upon old Ozzie by time and fate, albeit a joke that is completely lost on said pharaoh, as his "metabolically challenged" (i.e., dead) condition make him unable to either appreciate or resent it. It is thus commonly accepted that the "message" in Shelley's poem has to do with the fragile nature of works commissioned by the mighty—as in "here today and gone a couple of thousand years from now"—and the presumably eternal qualities of art, which somehow manage to muddle through thick and thin.

Fair enough, I suppose.

My own interpretation is a bit more depressing, as it involves the reader, who must come to grips with the idea that if what someone like Oxymandias wrought was reduced to pieces of a statue lying in a desert wasteland, then what hope is there for the survival of any part of what is accomplished by us mere mortals? (I'm confident there's an upside to this scenario; I'm just not sure what it might be. :^)

In any event, the subject was driven home to me yesterday—in Cinemascope and Technicolor—when Galina and I visited an estate sale just down the road from where we live.

I find that, with the passage of the years, I have begun to develop an aversion to estate sales. You see, it's easy enough to identify with someone holding a yard sale or garage sale: hey, it's just people like me, getting rid of junk, y'know? And in previous years, estate sales don't hit any nerves, either, because there's not much to identify with. But yesterday's estate sale? Oh, it definitely hit a nerve, mostly because of the books that were on display.

I own a bunch of the same volumes, you see. Books by authors like Kernighan, Ritchie, Stroustrup, and Steele. Books about languages like C, C++, and Prolog. Fiction paperbacks that you can find on my shelves. Books their owner cared enough to keep around, except that now, their owner has "checked out, permanently" and now all of them sport price tags, in the face of apparently indifferent demand.

For a moment, I wondered if this was what an estate sale featuring my junk might look like, at some time that is I hope far in the future. And it made me think about why I hang onto the stuff that I have and whether it really makes sense to keep all of it around, and if so, then what part should I keep and what part should I get rid of?

It made my head hurt, let me tell you, and that only added insult to injury.

Peter O'Toole, RIP

While O'Toole's starring performance in Lawrence of Arabia will never be far from the surface when the actor's name is mentioned, I must confess that his performance as Alan Swann in My Favorite Year is one that gave me even greater pleasure and put the film in my personal list of "10 best" films.

"If you can't do something willingly and joyfully, then don't do it," said O'Toole once. "If you give up drinking, don't go moaning about it; go back on the bottle. Do. As. Thou. Wilt."

Amen, brother.