All is vanity

Woody in high school

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare.
The lone and level sands stretch far away. --Shelley

I haven't yet seen Woody Allen's latest film, To Rome with Love, but I'm sure I soon will.  Any movie that combines Woody Allen, Jesse Eisenberg, and the City of Rome -- all in one bright, shimmering film -- can't be a movie that's gone too far wrong. 

Reviews of the film have revived the term "Ozymandias melancholia," which Woody Allen apparently coined in his movie Stardust Memories.  As far as I'm concerned, if the new movie actually is a reflection on "Ozymandias melancholia" -- well, that's just the frosting on the cake.

I'm a guy who can't look at a painting, or read a book, or gaze at a ruin, without thinking -- they're all dead now.  Once they were alive and curious, amazed at the dead people who had lived before them.  Just  as I am now.  And now they aren't.

I recall how, as a college freshman, I read Herodotus for the first time and learned how he had stood in awe before the Egyptian pyramids, marveling at the ancient civilization that had created such great works.  Herodotus was writing in about 450 B.C. The Great Pyramid would already have been two thousand years old when Herodotus's eyes first fell upon it.  Among my reactions, even as a callow 18-year-old, was melancholy at the passage of time, and at the utter vanity of any man's heroic efforts to ensure an immortal reputation among future generations.  Ozymandias melancholy. 

Woody Allen has been quoted as saying that he doesn't really care whether his films live forever.  He's more interested that he himself live forever.  It's a nice quip, but probably not true.  No one writes and directs seventy films in a 76-year (to date) lifetime simply -- as he claims -- to keep from thinking about death.  Somewhere deep inside, there lurks a hankering after a cinematic legacy that will long survive him.

But not forever, of course.  As Woody notes, even our Sun's days are numbered.  In the long run, to amend Keynes's aphorism, we're not only all dead.  We're also all forgotten.