Irvin D. Yalom - Staring at the Sun (2011)
> I have let go of the wish, the hope, that I myself, my image, will persist in any tangible form. Certainly there will come a time when the last living person who has ever known me dies. Decades ago, I read in Alan Sharp’s novel A Green Tree in Gedde a description of a country cemetery with two sections: the “remembered dead” and the “truly dead.” The graves of the remembered dead are tended and adorned with flowers, whereas the graves of the truly dead were forgotten; they were flowerless, weed infested, with tombstones askew and eroded.
Alan Sharpe - A Green Tree in Gedde (1965)
But when at last the threads of memory rot and the
rememberers themselves are tombed, then the liberated
dead move in silent flit to the old open field of the truly
buried, and there in sight of the living they relax and at last
rest.
Who will believe my verse in time to come
If it were filled with your most high deserts?
Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say “This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.”
So should my papers, yellowed with their age,
Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage
And stretchèd meter of an antique song.
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice—in it and in my rhyme.