"Fame - a few words upon a tombstone, and the truth of those not to be depended on"
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Fame, in Bovee's telling, is a brutally small object: not a legacy, not a living presence, but a handful of chiseled words that survive mainly because stone outlasts skin. The dash after "Fame" works like a trapdoor. It drops the romantic idea of renown into the practical world of epitaphs, where reputation is literally reduced, edited, and made to fit.
The second clause is the knife. "And the truth of those not to be depended on" targets the memoir-industrial complex of the 19th century: biographical dictionaries, obituary prose, pious tributes, and civic mythmaking that sand down contradictions into something printable. Epitaphs aren't written to be accurate; they're written to be acceptable. They flatter the family, satisfy the community, and tidy up a life into a moral. Bovee isn't just skeptical of fame's permanence; he's suspicious of the instruments that certify it.
The subtext is darker than simple cynicism. If all that remains is a curated sentence, then "fame" becomes less about achievement than about narrative control: who gets to summarize you, who gets omitted, who gets elevated. It's an early diagnosis of the branding problem, long before "public relations" became an industry. The epitaph is the original bio: short, confident, and potentially lying.
Bovee's intent is corrective, almost hygienic. He punctures the fantasy that posterity is an honest judge, and he reminds readers that remembrance is a genre with its own rules - compression, sentiment, selective truth.
The second clause is the knife. "And the truth of those not to be depended on" targets the memoir-industrial complex of the 19th century: biographical dictionaries, obituary prose, pious tributes, and civic mythmaking that sand down contradictions into something printable. Epitaphs aren't written to be accurate; they're written to be acceptable. They flatter the family, satisfy the community, and tidy up a life into a moral. Bovee isn't just skeptical of fame's permanence; he's suspicious of the instruments that certify it.
The subtext is darker than simple cynicism. If all that remains is a curated sentence, then "fame" becomes less about achievement than about narrative control: who gets to summarize you, who gets omitted, who gets elevated. It's an early diagnosis of the branding problem, long before "public relations" became an industry. The epitaph is the original bio: short, confident, and potentially lying.
Bovee's intent is corrective, almost hygienic. He punctures the fantasy that posterity is an honest judge, and he reminds readers that remembrance is a genre with its own rules - compression, sentiment, selective truth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Legacy & Remembrance |
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