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When Will You Be Totally Forgotten?
Calculating my “Moment of Oblivion.”
They say you aren’t totally dead until your name is spoken for the last time.
For some it will take longer than others. Much, much longer. I can’t imagine we’ll stop saying Julius Caesar’s name anytime soon. He did pay a high price of admission into Club Immortality, though, what with all those knife wounds in the back.
Or Genghis Khan. Especially when he was such a prolific baby daddy that even today 1 in 200 men in the former Mongol Empire share a common male ancestor — which was almost certainly him. Guy must have had a hell of a Tinder profile.
Adolf Hitler will be hanging around for a bit. History is filled with noteworthy murderers. In fact, that seems to be your best bet for a ticket into the remembrance afterlife. We won’t soon forget Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong either.
Most of your prominent dictators, kings, barbarians, and major leaders down through history, good or evil, beloved or reviled, will likely live on in the collective consciousness. Ozymandias’ statue may have crumbled in the desert, but hey, we’re still talking about him, aren’t we?
