Brain Drippings (Blog)

November 3, 2026

Today Dan, my jazz combos instructor, asked us what we want on our gravestones. Well, that's a big question, and I had never given it any thought before. I don't really relish the idea of my own death, but still, it's kind of an interesting question.

The reason he asked, obviously, is because he wanted to tell us his own, which was: He reached his potential. I couldn't help but laugh at that, because I love bitterly cynical things. The statement is basically the utter opposite of that — the simplistic idealism of believing that reaching your potential is a realistic and measurable achievement which could be confidently asserted upon your death would be almost tragic in its naivete, but coming from someone like Dan, who is obviously not a simplistic idealist, it smacks of delicious irony. The bitter irony being, of course, that one's potential is an unreachable, and in fact senseless, goal, whose pursuit can only ever bring you torment and dissatisfaction. The idea of hoping to display the achievement of this goal is therefore very funny to me.

But before he told us his, and I got chided for what he took to be laughing at the idea that he could achieve his potential, we all went around and said what we would want our epitaphs to be. The two that I came up with on the spot were:

Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt, which is from Slaughterhouse Five. I think I like this one because of its ambiguity — again a contrast between what could be interpreted as either bitter irony or sincere sentimentalism, but which I prefer to think of as both simultaneously. I also just love Vonnegut, and if not through a carefully selected reference, how will cemetery wanderers know how impeccable my literary sensibilities were, and how total my commitment to displays of highbrow intellectualism? (Not that Vonnegut is that highbrow... or at least I don't think he was in his day, before the concept of any literacy at all became highbrow.)

and

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
from Walt Whitman, Song of Myself.

Here are some more possibilities which I've thought of since then:

We are the mechanism through which the universe can comprehend itself.
For such small creatures as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.
— Carl Sagan

I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space.
— Shakespeare, Hamlet.
I think this quote, with normally ends with were it not that I have bad dreams, is about the inherent limitations of the human experience — that we get a glimpse at the glory of existence, and yet the very perception which affords us such wonder is necessarily plagued by the knowledge of its own limitations. Thus while being tied to a human form (the nutshell), one's life is suffused by bad dreams (the mind's incomplete, subjective, and always emotional interpretation — the never-ending turmoil.) Perhaps only in death can we be free of the bad dreams. And yet, we believe in the infinite space in life, too.

Long you live and high you fly
And smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry
And all you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be.
— Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon

Which do you like best? What do you want your epitaph to be?