"Brevity is the soul of wit"

In Shakespeare’s HAMLET, Polonius explains this to Claudius before expounding upon King Claudius just how mad—and utterly insane his “nephew” Hamlet is. “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Is this true? I think so. A truly witty, humorous, and memorable occurrence in all of our lives, arguably, stems from some momentary “snapshot” or “slice of life” with which we find ourselves enmeshed. How funny our little lives are here on earth. And how brief. In Shelly’s poem Ozymandias, the great king Ozymandias builds a large tower/statue of himself in the desert, thinking it will stand for all time. “I am the great Ozymandais,” he says ad nauseum, “I will forever reign.” Well, he didn’t say that verbatim, but you get the point. What is ironic, upon reading the poem, is how, years and years later, modern people (archaeologists or whatever) find the remnants of the statue and wonder who the heck this Ozymandais was. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,” he says. Kind of funny, huh?

Yes, our lives, fortunately or unfortunately, are transient, yet so full of wit; they provide stories for others to remark about and laugh at. And then, one day, we are gone. In Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily,” Ms. Emily, the anomalism of the town, stays inside her house for years and years—nothing comes out except this intense smell. “What could it be,” the townspeople wonder. Emily provided stories to be told by the townspeople—she became a folk tale in her own community. She married a “Yankee” from the North, who later died and was buried. She was devastated, and this only added to her reclusiveness. Then she died. She was gone. And the townspeople got their wish—they got to see what the smell was. She has exhumed her deceased husband, dressed him in his wedding garb, and laid him on the bed next to where she slept. One of her “silver gray hairs” was recumbent against the indentation of the bed’s pillow.

A lot of people have these types of stories about lives we neither know nor understand until the truth comes out—and when it does, it provides us with these stories (like the ones I write about now). My colleague remembers “Walking George,” as he was called, a mentally retarded Vassalboro, Maine townie who was absolutely reliant on his mother for all his needs. He earned the moniker for his incessant walks down the country roads of Vassalboro. Day or night. When his mother did finally die, he kept her in the house, in her carrion state, for, what the authorities estimate to be, about six or seven weeks.

Along with the fascination of the “unknown dead” comes my own testimony from my Dover, NH days, when I rented about the seediest, most terrible living space I can imagine. It abutted another shady looking house where lived a UNH Professor Emeritus of theater—his “concentration,” I believe, was in marionette puppets, for when his door remained open on warm spring nights, I could see a plethora of glazed glass eyes from the puppets faces staring at me ominously from the kitchen. My then girlfriend Amanda was pretty freaked out by the whole thing. And then spring became summer, summer became fall, and then he started staying in more. I never got to talking to him much, but I did notice that his car barely ever left his driveway—all through the winter he was stationary; he didn’t even plow or shovel. Perhaps he winters in Florida, I thought.

And then, spring came again. Once Saturday I was greeted by his kids, who did live in Florida, moving stuff out of dad’s house. It was late March and he had been dead since Christmas. And no one knew. And, presumably, no one cared. What made this story all the more fascinating was how when my brother in law Jonathan (who happened to be down for the weekend) and I left for a run, one of the professor’s sons asked us if we wanted any “pornos.” Kind of a strange question for a Saturday morning, I said, especially when I’ve never met you. He laughed. Then he proceeded to bring three forty gallon trash bags OVERFLOWING with 70 and 80’s porn VHS tapes. He tossed them into the rented dumpster with the nonchalance as if they were old ceramic “Charming Tales” dust collector figures no one wanted. Apparently, our professor was into more than just puppets.

It’s a funny story, but a sad one. Brevity truly is the soul of wit. For this one modicum of time, the professor, Walking George, and Ms. Emily were the subjects of a funny story shared at a coffee shop, a bar, a party. But for them, these stories were their lives. The common denominator for all was that they involved, in some capacity, the dead. Which begs the question: How many of us are dead inside right now? Are we the walking dead too? How many of the smiling faces which we see every day are really just masks of an individual dying inside of loneliness, depression, alcoholism, domestic abuse, or more? And will our lives, so brief, become stories which will be passed down, for better or for worse, forever? What type of secret do you harbor?

“When we go our lives will be like comet dust
Coming round the world as both of us
Our stories and memories still survive”

Jared Goldsmith

"25 Again"