Human health, like everything under (and around) the sun, is subject to the relentless progress of entropy. Ice melts, iron rusts, people age and die. Nothing in medicine changes the fact that our overall mortality rate is always 100%.
“Death is not the enemy but occasionally needs help with timing.”
- Law 20 from Peter Safar’s Laws for the Navigation of Life.
BitingTheDust‘s ‘Wreck of the Week‘ is a potent visual reminder of this unchangeable law of the universe. It is also a buffer against Ozymandian hubris and a warning that some parts of the world make no allowance for softness.
A 'Wreck of the Week' from BitingTheDust (photo by Wolf Cocklin)
I’m looking forward to seeing profile photos of Mike (@sandnsurf) and Robbo (@bitethedust) in future editions of the ‘Wreck of the Week‘.
Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. 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!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
About Chris Nickson
