Last night, watching
my husband stand up to put a DVD into the player, I had one of those odd
moments where I feel somehow detached from the immediate present and float out
into some sort of external view of things. So at the same time as seeing the
vitality of him, his beautiful physique, his obvious strength, I was struck by his terrible fragility - at how easily even a strong, healthy body like his can so easily be broken or break down. How very precarious life is.
And I was once again
aware of how tiny, in the greater scheme of things, a single human life is.
Here is this person, precious beyond belief to me, and significant in his way
to us, his family and friends, to those he works with and to those who
seek his advice. But we too, are small unknowns, and once he's gone, his memory
is unlikely to last much beyond a name and maybe a few small anecdotes after a
few generations.
It seems more than a
little sad.
I understand
the almost frenzied efforts of many for just a little fame. It does seem hard
to live with the idea of a life hard-lived, with so much effort and care and struggle and achievement, vanishing from consciousness so quickly.
But as I think back
to the tiny percentage of humans whose names are attached to achievements great
enough to keep them in human consciousness for some time I see how the their
significance is built on the unseen lives and actions of so many, many others.
Shakespeare would not be known today if there were no-one then who loved his
work enough to perform it and watch it, and if there were no-one in our age to
love his work enough to continue to read it, publish it and perform it, or even
just to talk about him. Even underneath that one has to see the role of his
parents, even if just biologically, friends who supported him, the builders who
built the homes where he lived and the theatres where his plays were performed.
The list is endless. Some of those were significant enough in his life that
without their contribution Shakespeare would have drifted into anonymity, as
most of us do.
And so the whole of humanity takes on the form of a live organism with all the cells and
organs working together. Occasionally their combined actions, historical and contemporary, reach some kind of
critical mass that produces someone who benefits enough to produce something that launches them into either fame or notoriety.
There is potentially
no insignificance in the lives of any of us. Insignificance is not the same as anonymity. And there is a
enough of a difference between the two to make it worth the struggle to live a
life well.
