In the eyes of beholder

Nothing beside remains.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

       In November, foolish subjects of the king hibernate, and winter creatures are not awake yet. It might be warmer in the Royal Garden, in gazebos and teahouses, but the flags and ragged balloons flapping in the winds, merry-go-rounds that did not go around and just creaked and shuddered under the gusts of storm were too sad. Daddy Jones was sitting all alone on a cliff and gazing at the lone, uneven shoreline stretching far away, hemmed with a lace of ice and foam. Relentless waves were gnawing at the cliffs, biting the rock off grain by grain. In a thousand years, there would be lone and level sands stretching just as far. Would there be beasts? Maybe. Strange like the winter creatures, different from mymbles and hemulens of today, they would still exist. Would they still remember the monarch of this island? No, not at all. It is crystal clear to a man over a hundred years old, on such a sombre day. Once he had wanted to be the first and only autocrat known for jokes and fun, not for wars and conquests. His silly subjects would remember Daddy Jones, that’s right. Their children would, from the stories of the parents. Their grandchildren would maybe know his name. Later, all fame would die. Memory is more fragile than a rock. Poets say nay; they claim power over time. Well, great poets seem to have it, but how’d you know that the poet building ye good monarch a monument is a genius? A lottery, pure lottery. And besides, poets build verbal monuments to themselves, not to the subject of their poems, because words carry a poet’s view of some subject, not the subject itself. Let’s assume that some romantic, poetic creature wrote a book of adventures and far lands. What would they say about a ruler of this island? Right, there was an old, frail, greyheaded man, mischievous and whimsical, loving garden parties and practical jokes. Would a self-absorbed author see the efforts Autocrat had put into saving his subjects from boredom, depression, thoughts of futility, bearing all that anguish in himself and only letting it out on a late November day? Would an unknown chronicler see the autocrat in all his doubts and conflicts, both as Daddy Jones and King Lear? Nay, hardly. And it is fine. There is nothing scary in oblivion.