Kurt Russell

Well, I'm off to another wild Saturday morning! I was browsing the internet and saw a webpage I'd bookmarked called Last Words. Curious, I clicked it and began reading through an alphabetized list of famous last words. I know, I know, first Chopin and now this. If you were curious though, Chopin on his deathbed was quoted as saying, "play Mozart in memory of me - and I will hear you." Now, Mozart on the other hand, has one of the most beautiful farewells of the entire bunch: The taste of death is upon my lips...I feel something, that is not of this earth.

It's interesting, poring over the last uttered phrases of those departed. It is the closest we can get to experiencing death, albeit vicariously. If words are an attempt at expressing ideas, feelings, or sentiments, then by listening to these last words we steal glances of a final fettle. That's not to say that they are always clear and honest reflections, often it seems quite the contrary. Some are denials, contrivances, feigned phrases and attempts at wit which reveal more than the actual sentence does. There is something important to be learned from this list of collective celebrity - death, like everything else, has manifold interpretations. We often think of death with a cold hard finality, as something objective that we all must face. It's easy to forget that we'll all face it subjectively, on our own terms. Death then, seems like a final reflection, a moment to consider your life and decide if it was what you wanted it to be. If it wasn't, well, in that moment death might feel like a hell weighing down on you, crushing your spine with resentment and regret, anger, helplessness and loss. But instead, if you lived in accord with what your heart whispered, if you chased what it was you dreamed, if you sucked the flavor from life's cigarette with the fervor of a dirty transient, then death might feel like the ending to a great movie, prompting a tearful standing ovation from your soul. There's a quote from Borges I've been trying to find for the last twenty minutes without success. He sums up nicely what I'm trying to say here but, for now you'll have to settle for my shortcomings.

If there is one thing any of us should truly want, it should be that on our deathbeds we might look back on our lives and feel contented.

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Last Words:

"Beautiful" - Timothy Leary

"What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset" - Crowfoot

"Kurt Russell" - Walt Disney