Last night, I was sitting and pondering on the movie "Babette's Feast." In the movie, an old General says to himself, "Vanity. It is all Vanity." When I heard this old man, this esteemed general, consider upon his life--his accomplishments, his success, his failures, and everything else that had happened to him--and refer to them as but "vanity," I didn't know what to think, except that perhaps he was speaking the truth. Often, in this life, it seems we seek after "vanity," it seems that we only strive to gain the approval of those around us--whose opinions never really matter. Wouldn't it be sad, at the end of this life, if all you had ever done was become successful in the eyes of others?
As the General rode to the dinner celebration, he turned and asked his aunt: "What if all the victories in your life, truly meant that you had been defeated?" Had he traded what he wanted most for what really mattered to him? As I watched the rest of the movie, I continued to think about those questions. I thought that I might be able to find answers to these questions, or at least find someone who had pondered and written about them.
This is what I found:
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
-Robert Frost, "Nothing Gold Can Stay"
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