A monument to the idea

In the November issue of Rolling Stone, Eddie Murphy dispensed some wisdom on the dangers of taking yourself too seriously. In an interview, he said:

This whole period of documenting an artist’s work, movies, records, all this shit, it’s 100 years old, if it’s that. It’s brand-new. Beethoven and those fuckers couldn’t even listen to their shit, do you know how hard it was to find a mother-fucker with a violin that worked back then? And his stuff went through the ages. Technology has it where they gonna play this stuff forever. But the reality is, all this shit turns to dust, everything is temporary. No matter what you do, if you’re around here long enough, you’ll wind up dribbling and shitting on yourself, and you won’t even remember the shit you did. I saw this documentary on Ronald Reagan, and it was like, ‘Whoa.’ They say he came into the house, and he had the toy White House that he had taken out of a fish tank, and he goes, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing with this, but I know it has something to do with me.’ He had even forgotten he was the president. No matter what you do, that shit is all getting turned into gobbledygook. In 200 years, it’s all dust, and in 300 years, it ain’t nothing, and in 1,000 years, it’s like you wasn’t even fucking here. But if you’re really, really lucky, if you really did something special, you could hang around a little longer.