In a thousand years from now, how would we prove that we lived? For what traces would remain — even if we had descendants, who of them would recall someone that ancestral? The sturdiest lives, those who held so much promise: how many from that far back can you say achieved the merest immortality, that we see their name jotted down somewhere? More are they the vast majority: there is no proof of them at all. But yet, even if there be the fact that I leave behind nothing that lasts, ultimately, I myself am the only true witness whether I haved lived or no. My proof is in my living this day. The meaning of life is not that you be remembered — for much of that is accident and rushed chances — but instead that you remember how sweet life has been when at last you die. For the memorials to us do us no good when we no longer walk this world: rather that it is up to us to make of the days we have a life that is worth all the miraculous seconds that are given us. And in a thousand years, this will still be true.