The good is oft interred with their bones

At a funeral yesterday, I thought of the words of Marc Antony from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, "The evil men do lives after them while the good is oft interred with their bones." Fortunately this does not seem to be so in the twenty-first century. Now it seems that people's good points are stressed and remembered by families and friends. Although we can still learn from the difficulties our loved ones have faced during their lives, it is easier to remember and emulate the characteristics which endeared them to us. When we are not sure how to act, we have fond memories to inspire us.

(Rocky Mountains- Estes Park, Colorado)

The Impersistence of Memory

In the column above mine in The Daily News this morning Scot DeSmit wrote about his faulty recollection of characters from a book he read to his children. He remembered a rabbit and a gopher rather than a squirrel and a mole. His column reminded me of the many times I have misrecollected things and events from my past. I have remembered houses being somewhere else, people looking and acting different and events not being quite the same as others recollect them. In studying memory, I learned that there are biological traces of every memory we have. Our minds also seem to have a pastime of creating scenarios different from the ones which actually happened. Maybe there is a novelist inside each of us happily going about creating new events from the material provided by reality. It certainly makes for an interesting world.