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Guy YedwabVictoria Anderson9/24/06Death is not something which I normally like to think about myself, but like many things, deathcomes upon us unexpectedly. Sometimes that's because death happens, claiming a friend or anacquaintance or a public figure, but at other times its a thought, or a book, or a piece of art. The pieceof art which prompted my recent intellectual grappling with death is an untitled production still whichhangs in the lobby of the Tisch Building on our campus. Three days a week, four times a day, I pass bythis photo, and it always sucks the voice out of my throat. I can't speak when I see it; I can't think of anything other than the overwhelming feeling that I am looking at a crystal-clear representation of death. There lies a young girl on a bed with an empty cup next to the hand of hers that dropped it; aclear image of unexpected death. How terrifying is it for a man with dreams to have to face the chillingidea that death might not claim him at the end of a fruitful life, but rather in the middle of an action assimple as having your cup of tea! As an actor, as a writer, as a political dreamer, as a man who maywant a family some day, the idea that I might die before realizing any of that is crippling. I have seenalmost no photographs, no hung paintings, no sculptures with quite the same emotional kick as this onestrikes me in the stomach with.It's a very confusing fear about death; it's probably based on the assumption that if I feel like Idied at the right time, having added something to the world, death will be okay; as though my life is asculpture which I am constantly working on all the days of my life, and when I die it is the end of  preparation and the final museum viewing. The philosopher William Benjamin saw this view when hefamously said, “The work is the death-mask of its conception.” It's a comforting idea, that says thateven though I'll be dead, it will all have amounted to something. It also holds me to a higher standardof living while I'm alive, knowing that deep down I will be judged for having lived my life beautifully.That, perhaps, is why I am so involved in the rituals of death; it's the final punctuation of a life
 
 beautifully lived. How frustrating is it to reach the end of the play (for instance, the play I saw a week ago named
'Nami
) and have the good work of the playwright fall apart because of a weak ending?Great sentences refuse to trail off; great paintings do not skip the final detailing; I cannot die withoutthat final punctuation mark. I love the last words of great people: whether it is the beautifullyconstructed irony of Oscar Wilde's “Either the wall-paper goes, or I do,” or Karl Marx's self-assured“Last words are for people who haven't said enough in life.” The saddest last words I ever remember are Che Guevara's last words: “Don't let it end like this—tell them I said something.” Does it reallymatter that his last moments in life were filled with terrible regret of writer's block finishing his lastmoments? Probably not. If there is an afterlife, than theoretically he has eternity to get over that regret(and realize that his life will be judged by more than it's ending; Che's live has not been cheapened bythat last failure). If there is no afterlife, then nothing will matter to him at all. As Rosencrantz aptly points out in
 Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead 
 by Tom Stoppard (which compares life to beingcharacters onstage, and looks at the tragedy of two bit-roles), people imagine that being dead will beterrible because in the end they are imagining being alive instead. They get hung up on the idea of  being trapped in a box underground so much that they forget that their consciousness is literally goingto be erased.For myself, I would hate to think that my consciousness would be erased. Just thinking about itcauses my breath to catch in my chest, as if by holding my breath now I could somehow avoid thefuture that is to come. I think of all the things I want to do, all the things which I will never have timeto do and which, once I am dead, I will never have the chance to do again. Sure, I want to act. I alsowant to write. I also want to be a Spoken Word Poet. I'd love to be a Supreme Court Justice. I'd love to be a mathematician. I'd love to be in Congress, or the Presidency. I'd love to rewrite the laws, rewritehistory, rewrite knowledge, rewrite people's souls. Just to do it once will not be enough – I want to do itagain and again until I've left an incredible mark on the world that will put my awkward name amongthe greatest names in history. And once I've died, no matter how much I've done, I will have lost the
 
opportunity to do more. Ironically, the more I do while I'm alive, the more I could have done after mydeath; and the less I do while alive, the less I will have achieved.But if my legacy is large enough, I now realize, my very legacy will only grow in time. Irecently read the play
Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde
by playwright MoisesKaufman. It's a play which uses the life and death of Oscar Wilde to examine persecution of homosexuals and artists. In the afterward, fellow playwright Tony Kushner ends with the words: “Look at the legacy that Wilde's industry has left behind,
 from which
 
 so much has descended 
, including this beautiful play.” (emphasis mine).
 From which so much as descended...
those words refer not to Oscar Wilde's immediate influence on humanity. Those are not the ripples in the pond that Oscar Wilde made.Those are the ripples that each of those ripples made; those are the indirect influences that Oscar Wildeenabled, but which he didn't even have to be alive to see. Shakespeare wrote
 Hamlet 
. He did not write
The Lion King 
.
The Lion King 
is based on
 Hamlet 
, and has influenced its own generations of kids.Oscar Wilde did not write
Gross Indecency
, but its appearance in 1990s America is every bit asinfluential as the appearance of 
The Picture of Dorian Grey
in his contemporary Ireland and England.Because while Oscar Wilde himself is but mortal, Wilde's art and his legacy are immortal for as long as people find his legacy worth recording and for as long as his legacy inspires them. The fact that I'mwriting an essay which references him is a testament to his timelessness.Every time I see the name of a dead person and do not know who they are, I feel an incrediblesadness inside because I know that they will be forgotten. Once I heard of a story (the name has beenerased with time) which posited that the afterlife was a mansion on an island, and the dead on the islandgot to stand based on how many people remembered them and how deeply they were cared about bythe living. Famous people (a Kennedy or a Martin Luther King) who left deep impacts got to stay in theliving rooms, and as one faded from the living collective one faded further and further out of themansion and toward the edge of the island until suddenly you went out to sea and your soul was lostforever. How many people have been lost out to sea forever; how many people are only barely kept on
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