My grandfather died when I was 3, he was a Tolkien dwarf of a man with a heart so full it gave out early. He raised his kids on Monty Python, The Greatful Dead, and Alanis Morissette. He brought home people like a child brings home stray animals, no motive other than offering them the care and love they need. I’m now ten times the age I was when he passed, closer now to the age he was when he did, and still I’m occasionally talking to a stranger in a city far from home only for them to recognize me as Lee’s grandkid. There’s a certain weighty pride to being the ilk of a man turned legend solely for giving people a hot meal and a roof to sleep under when they needed it.
Eat the Mona Lisa
No thanks, I just had a yellow kiwi, a can of tuna and some cabbage 🤷
Ah, a classic KTC sandwich, the BLT’s less well-known cousing.
Yeah, some kind of fruit and a can of tuna (or some other fish) is my usual post-exercise snack and various kinds of cabbage is my main “satisfy hunger with very few calories” food 😁
We ate all forgotten to time. Even if your name and some actions are carved in to a rock; a name is just a name.
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" No thing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.— Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias”
Not that I’m advocating being a dick, but very few if any persons from antiquity are remembered for being kind. Case in point: Ea Nasir
Do we really remember him, though? We have a name and a complaint, and nothing else. But what effcts of his rippled down through time?
The world at large remembers our actions, even if small. Imagine we never knew about how close we got to nuclear war way back when; would it be weird to say that our human experience still “remembers”?
And hey, I’d rather be forgotten as an individual than remembered for being horrible. Anybody who would choose otherwise should be likewise remembered for when they were strung up by an angry mob.
Arguably Jesus is the most well-known ancient figure in the western world (assuming he actually did exist) and pretty much all he did during his life was being nice to people
Devil’s advocate: Plato is probably well-known for being Aristotle’s master, and Aristotle is probably well-known because he was the mentor of fucking Alexander the Great. So one could argue that the basis of western philosophy was set by a murderous emperor
I don’t think anyone doubts that Jesus was a historical figure?
Virtually all scholars of antiquity accept that Jesus was a historical figure, and the idea that Jesus was a mythical figure has been consistently rejected by the scholarly consensus as a fringe theory.
-source: Wikipedia Historical Jesus
But anyway I mostly agree with you. “Heroes” are something that cultures invent to lift up whatever it is that in that moment they want to espouse as being good. I wanted to make a point referencing the enormous differences in which people or quotes get mentioned & encouraged now vs. a year ago by political leaders in the USA, but that would run afoul of Rule 8 in this community so we’ll have to keep it superficial: what gets remembered over time is what is beneficial to cultures to want to remember.
Which makes Jesus an extremely pivotal point in history, e.g. overturning millennia of oppression of women (“husbands, submit yourselves to your wives…” - and vice versa too, so a more equal partnership even among differing roles like care-giver and bread-winner), which of course was spread along with Rome as its technology (e.g. roads & waterworks) also spread.
Be nice to people, be a dick to fig trees
