Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
A line from the Dylan Thomas poem
In the not too distant past, whenever I went to the gym for my almost daily workout, I’d often come home and remark to Mary about a couple of the older gentlemen who frequent that place. I’d tell her how well I thought they were doing even though they were older men. It was quite the event when I discovered their true ages: one hadn’t reached 60 yet and the other was 62. The joke was on me with the glaring fact that I was the oldest of the three at 65!
On a wall in my study hangs a picture of a young boy at the age of two standing with his father behind a harnessed team of draft horses. The year would be 1944. Was it taken yesterday or 63 years ago? The answer is the latter and that little boy would be me. Much more time has passed than what remains to me, but I take my philosophy of life from the Dylan Thomas poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," a line from which I used as the epigraph to this piece.
Death has been the subject of many a poet or philosopher through the ages, and I have never forgotten one quote from the historian Arnold Toynbee: "The Greek historian Herodotus reports that the Persian emperor Xerxes wept after he had reviewed his immense expeditionary force because he realized that not a single member of it would still be alive one hundred years later." It gave meaning to a banner that used to be displayed in the lunchroom of Bek Hall at UND when I attended that school: "All is transitory — Keats." At the time the quotation was too lofty and philosophical for me to give much thought. The more I think about it, the more those words hold meaning for me or anyone else who cares to contemplate them. A person can’t do much about the passage of time, so I’ll keep my thoughts in step with the aforementioned Dylan Thomas.
