Famous Last Words: A Thing of the Past

Looking through a few web pages of famous last words is an entertaining way to pass half an hour. You may roll your eyes at the French grammarian Dominique Bouhours ("I am about to - or I am going to - die: either expression is correct"), smile at Eugene O'Neil ("I knew it, I knew it. Born in a hotel room and - God damn it - died in a hotel room"), smirk at Oscar Wilde ("I am fighting a losing battle with the wallpaper and one of us has to go"), raise an appreciative eyebrow at Voltaire (who, when asked if he renounced the devil and all his imps, replied "I don't think this is a good time to be making enemies"), but here's the thing: it's all over. 

Isn't it? Can you imagine anybody rushing to record (or wanting to record) the dying words of our current celebrities? Reading through the dying words of saints and martyrs, writers and poets, statesmen, royalty and serial killers is one thing. But the contemporary warping of the concept and mechanics of 'fame' changes the perspective, as does perhaps the information age in which we live. It's also worth questioning whether today's society isn't less interested in the final words of an elderly person than what they might blurt out when they're young and shiny and stupid - something that might sell a few thousand issues of Heat magazine. By the time somebody famous gets to their deathbed, the media eye has long since turned away. After they're gone, if they were loved by enough people, there'll be an announcement on the news, the BBC will run a few dedicatory programmes and everyone will indulge in that bizarre collective sadness that the masses seem to enjoy so much. 

It's all over. And maybe therein lies the charm. The fascination with and perpetuation of famous last words is over. It's probably just as well: there's only so many things to say, and when you get to the twenty first century it's comparable to being last in one of those absurd party games where everybody has to name a country beginning with D and all the obvious ones have been taken. Besides, the desire to say something clever as you die belongs to the theatrical and verbose among us. As Karl Marx said shortly before he passed away: "Last words are for fools who haven't said enough."

Dying words are dead. Long live the ones we already have.

The Streets of London

The most wretched thing I've seen so far this week was a man riding a tandem. I had no camera with me, so this is my shot. Picture a typical street in central London, relatively empty of traffic and passersby: these are bokeh and the specifics are unimportant. Then see an antique, black bicycle-for-two with one lonely, figure hunched at the helm. Sometimes the bicycle wheel curves out, and takes him into the road a metre before he can correct it.  And he just keeps going, painfully slow in his weary balancing, pressing down on those pedals with his feet as if it's the hardest thing in the world. 

It made me sad. And I hadn't even got to thinking about the potential backstory...