April 13
What coats of arms extol, what power and beauty give, whatever wealth has ever bestowed — it awaits the same hour. The paths of glory, every one, lead only to the grave.
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (freely rendered)
Listening mode
What coats of arms extol, what power and beauty give, whatever wealth has ever bestowed — it awaits the same hour. The paths of glory, every one, lead only to the grave.
The thought that in the end everything comes out equal rarely arrives at the right moment. It likes to turn up when someone else has just achieved something: a promotion, a house, a name suddenly heard everywhere. Then it feels almost like justice. When you yourself succeed, it is conspicuously reticent.
Yet it makes no distinctions. What it subtracts from the lustre of others, it also takes from what you hold dear: perhaps a piece of work you're proud of, or a sentence someone said to you years ago that you don't want to forget. Whoever invokes transience against someone else's success is picking up a tool that can't be fixed to point in one direction only.
That is why the thought is poorly suited to comparison. It doesn't say whose life was the better one. It says only that in the end no one checks the accounts. Whether that is an affront or a relief depends on what you were about to enter in the books.
The next time someone congratulates you, you'll be pleased all the same. The thought changes surprisingly little about that.
