Ozymandius

I have a life-long habit of reading encyclopedias. When I was a kid my parents bought an Encyclopedia Britannica, which lived in a bookcase right by my bed. I could reach over and grab a volume anytime I liked, open it at random, and float away. And so I did. Then I discovered that at the end of each article there were articles cited within the encyclopedia, which led me further into the mists of totally random knowledge and unrelated trivia.

It was heaven for a poor kid, surrounded by a culture which was actively disinterested in learning or ideas.

Fast forward to the glories of Wikipedia.

I love Wikipedia. I send them money every month. I can, and have, spent hours wandering through its catacombs.

All this preamble is leading to Wikipedia as a source for songs. In this case, I was aware of Ozymandius, but only as a dusty 19th century poem by some Brit poet (Shelley) that was somehow connected to a competition with another poet, whose name I could never remember (Horace Smith). And the subject was something about a statue in the desert or whatever.

But then I read the Wiki about Shelley and Smith’s poems on Ozymandius, which is the Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II. Their poems describe how fate and history walk away from even the most well known, erasing their memory, until all that’s left, at most, are the remnants of a statue in the desert, slowly being covered by blowing sand.

All this went into my blender of a brain and I started getting this picture of a guy named Ozymandius, who’s clawed his way up to the top of some corporate dung heap. And now he’s living in the suburbs in a giant house, full of stuff, sitting for hours in commuter traffic every day, in a four-wheel drive SUV with a giant motor.

And, in answer to my own questions: Don’t you wish you were his children? Don’t you wish you had his life?

Nope. I don’t.