We all want to be remembered for something.
Preferably, we want to be remembered for something deemed uplifting, useful, helpful, meaningful. We want our brief existence to make a contribution to humanity, yet we don’t want to be grandiose about our claimed contributions. Nor do we want to engage in excessive self-regard or self-promotion, attributes that betray an insidious inadequacy and pestilence to the human race. Nor do we want to be pathological in our supposed altruism, caring without compromise for the world of strangers while behaving like churlish cretins toward our close family and friends.
We can look to a few people who have left a permanent mark on the culture, evidenced by the fact that their names have been turned into adjectives and are now an enduring part of our lexicon.
Orwellian points to totalitarian government agencies and their total corruption of language to exercise their oppression.
Kafkaesque points to bureaucratic absurdity, meaningless rules, and feelings of helplessness in the face of that meaninglessness.
Nabokovian points to pyrotechnic word play that razzle dazzles the readers.
Some people’s names have not been turned into adjectives, but their personalities embody a lasting cultural influence.
David Letterman embodies acerbic wit and deadpan irony, qualities that were especially shocking since he emerged out of the Disco Era when people wore Angel Flights bell-bottom slacks, platform shoes, and puka shell necklaces without a trace of irony.
Hugh Hefner embodies, in spite of Bill Maher’s historical revisionism, swanky self-indulgent prurience and arrested development, qualities that at one time seemed shockingly hip in contrast to the phony cultural conformity glorified by such iconic, homily-larded television shows as Leave It To Beaver and My Three Sons.
Martin Luther King represents powerful persuasion for self-sacrifice for liberal democracy and the war against racial tribalism.
Vladimir Putin represents a conniving operative who champions kleptocracies and totalitarian governments while sabotaging democratic ones.
Viktor Frankl represents the quest for meaning by not imposing our will on life but by listening to life’s demands and responding with urgency to those demands.
Hitler represents pure evil. Some would argue that Hitler’s evil was a form of madness. Others would argue that his evil was his cynical manipulation of others. I would argue that Hitler’s evil was a bit of both. It’s possible that evil begins as a cynical strategum. Then eventually the evil person becomes insane, like his cultish followers, from drinking his own Kool-Aid.
Some people suffer a type of egotism that hungers for notoriety, a particular way of being remembered severed from a moral framework. In the sociopath’s world, infamy becomes a reward unto itself.
Most of us, however, are not like that. Most of us want to be remembered for something morally good, or at the very least be remembered for having been distinctive.
Many of us are not content with being mere consumers of cultural trophy markers, amassing funds to satisfy our materialistic and social status cravings before passing out from consumeristic and social-climbing exhaustion and being buried six feet under.
Many of us acknowledge that we hunger for nice cars and luxury watches and spacious houses with all the technological upgrades and a life of first-class travel, fitness, health, “clean eating,” and a type of disciplined creative work and sustained focus that frees us from physical and psychological clutter. Such individuals may even have a tech-free “holy day,” a designated day of the week in which they turn off their Wi-Fi and gadgets while strolling with their loved ones and rescue animals along their private beachfront.
But even this very enviable lifestyle leaves us with a gaping spiritual hole that gnaws at us, what Viktor Frankl calls the “existential vacuum.”
Many of us want to be remembered. And it’s not just that we’re remembered, but how we are remembered, so at some point in our lives we may begin to develop a framework that will allow us to imagine ourselves being remembered because we are behaving in a way that we believe “makes a difference.”
Some of us don’t have a choice in this matter. Believing that we are put on this earth to be remembered for “making a difference” is how we are hardwired. If we’re not hardwired for this quest, we may have been taught to “make a difference” by the pillars of strong secular humanism or a well defined religious creed, but we may abandon this moral imperative for the pleasures of narcissistic indifference and self-centered indolence. For some of us, living in the sustained oblivion of self-indulgent hedonism becomes our sole objective.
But for many of us seeking pleasure-seeking oblivion is just a passing fancy. Eventually, we return to the state of wanting to be remembered, and if we take this quest seriously we realize we have to do something with ourselves. But we will likely find that doing something significant and memorable is no picnic at the beach. There are brilliant artists, scientists, writers, and philosophers who slog on in obscurity.
Dante died a pauper. He did eventually leave a mark, however. My Italian Literature professor once told me he was teaching The Inferno when one of his students fainted. I doubt Dante envisioned hundreds of years later a young student at a university in some other country would be studying his poetic descriptions of Hell and lose consciousness. Or perhaps that is precisely what he had in mind.
Dante used his imagination to create a physical universe of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise as an analogy of humanity’s psychological and spiritual condition of alienation from God, longing for God, and unity with God. This epic three-part poem has left a mark so that the term Dantean is a permanent part of the universal lexicon.
Curiously, though, Dantean addresses only the condition of Hell and is not used as a short-hand for Purgatory or Paradise. Descriptions of Hell, apparently, are more compelling than less tormented conditions. We could infer perhaps that life here on earth is so excruciating that poets who can articulate the scope of that suffering will have a better chance of being remembered.
We can be thankful that Dante didn’t live in another place and time when he may have been tempted to avoid poverty by composing saccharine Hallmark greeting cards. I suspect that such an insufferable occupation would have descended Dante through the nine circles of Hell.
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