I've thought hypothetically about
tattoos before too. Picking out a tattoo would be a difficult task. It would have to be something with my approval now, and the
approval of a future me whose tastes and values I can't really predict. Because of this, being tattoo-worthy has become a measure of the strength of an idea for me. I have
found only three ideas that I consider tattoo-worthy, three thoughts so unassailable and commanding that there is nothing that does not fall
within their expansive jurisdiction. You could build a life around these ideas. The first, not coincidentally, comes from my favorite
passage in my favorite book:
"Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the head-board with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two noses bending over them, as if our knee-pans were warming-pans. We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blankets between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal."
The image in that last sentence would be my tattoo.
~
I would probably summarize the second idea in this way, though not sure how I would translate it visually:
nothing,
itself,
is ever enough,
really.
~
The third is maybe more of a value than a truth. But a value for which I have found no compelling replacement. And this, not coincidentally, comes from my favorite passage from my other favorite book:
"And in our time, when a man dies - if he has had wealth and influence and power and all the vestments that arouse envy, and after the living take stock of the dead man's property and his eminence and works and monuments - the question is still there: Was his life good or was it evil? - which is another way of putting Croesus's question. Envies are gone, and the measuring stick is: 'Was he loved or was he hated? Is his death felt as a loss or does a kind of joy come of it?'...
...In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world."
I think I would want something like that on my gravestone, if it is true of me in some small measure at that time: "Whose death brought no pleasure to the world." And maybe that's how I would tattoo it. A lone headstone with that phrase, leaning delicately to the left, next to a small patch of grass.
