An eighty-year-old man was planting trees.
“His brains have gotten stale!” three youngsters laughed. “Pray tell me, for the love of God, how you expect to reap this labor’s fruit?” —“Or why you burden your remaining days with toil whose benefits you’ll never see?” —“The past is your domain: review, reflect, regret. Leave these ambitious dreams and projects to the young to carry out.” —“I’d understand if you were building something; but to plant a tree at your age!”
“Manufactured things,” the old man said, “come hard and easy go; but nature’s works endure. Posterity will owe me thanks for these trees’ fruit. That thought is fruit that I can taste today, tomorrow, maybe many days. The pains one takes for others are a pleasure. —Fate, besides, toys equally with all our days. Who knows which one of us will longest live to relish that diurnal masterpiece, the sky? Who knows which one of us will watch the new sun rise upon the others’ tombs? It might be you, or you, or you, or me.”
In fact, the youngsters died before the old man. One, embarking for America, was drowned while still in harbor. One, embroiled in politics and war, was stabbed by an assassin. And the third fell from a tree that he was grafting.
To commemorate them, the old man inscribed these words upon a cenotaph:
The human span is but an eyeblink,
and no moment’s certain of successors.
So enjoy, build, grow, live now.
You never know what death will disallow.