The Word Remains

"It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people will remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember, and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last long as there are human beings." ~ Ernest Hemingway

I oft ponder legacy and what will remain of what we do. Sometimes things seem so terribly fleeting and yet others maintain eternal. Being very historically minded I still must admit my own incredible shortcomings and acknowledge what any one person can comprehend and store in their mind, what any person can hear or read-(let alone that history which was written by the agenda of the victor)

so...

I come to the conclusion that what can be built by my own two hands, or rather typed by my own two hands is assuredly the greatest monument one can achieve for oneself, that and children who remember, yet as ages wear on, people die and forget. As mindful as I am I know precious little about my great-great grandfathers, and being the eldest grandson I know more of my grandfather than my cousins and siblings-but how much is that really? He was a poor journal keeper, and I alone did he tell his war-stories too, (still must finish that book)

so...
If I want legacy and something to be remembered for, writing is the truest thing I can leave behind. Stone fades and steel rusts, but the word...the word...remains.

Always makes you feel good when you get a review like this latest one...

"Finished a book today that surprised me, in the same way that Paradise Lost surprised me (at the risk of making too grandiose a comparison). Milton's poem joined epic poetry to Christian myth-history, creating a work that I hadn't seemed coming, but that in retrospect seemed inevitable.



David West similarly surprised me with his Heroes of the Fallen. It's pulp fiction swords and sorcery meets Mormon myth-history, a savage and bloody telling of the last days of Nephite civilization in the style of a Robert E. Howard or Edgar Rice Burroughs. I didn't see it coming, however obvious it seems to me now." by Dave Butler

Thanks Dave