‘OZY WHO?’

On the anniversary of the deaths of Martin Luther and Michelangelo we take the long view  on LEGACY…

Imagine the scene.  A canopy of stars look down on a leafy glade. It is 150,000 BCA (before Charles Aznavour) but there is more romance in the Palaeolithic moonlight than a hundred gallic balladeers on Oxytocin supplements. Love is in the air, but as one couple creeps away from the campfire eyebrows start climbing and looks are exchanged. One partner is human, and the other..?  Well, we don’t actually know.  The only remaining trace of the other species is a genetic variant of the MUC7 gene which codes for protein in our saliva; binding it to microbes and helping us expel bacteria, etc. from our oral tracts. This variant, still found today in the phlegm of 5 to 7 percent of populations in Sub-Saharan Africa, is the sole heritage of what archaeologists describe as a ‘ghost species,’ because there is no fossil record, or any other evidence whatsoever, to testify to a hominin journey which kicked off between 1.5 and 2 million years ago.

A bit further North, and approximately 138,000 years later, the Egyptian Pharoah, Ramesses II had a miraculous escape from a similar obscurity by that colossus of the early nineteenth century Business of Pleasure, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who allegedly…

‘..met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said –“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

It was a later poet and polymath, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the genius behind In The Heights and Hamilton who said: “I’ve been worried about legacy since I was a kid,” But there can’t be many of us involved in The Business of Pleasure who haven’t given at least a passing thought to what we leave behind.  Maybe when typing, or titling, those six little letters that consign a work to posterity: 'THE END.'  Or when scoring the coda of a symphony that we hope will strike a note in audiences for thousands of years to come.

The concept of generativity, was first defined by the influential Frankfurt-born psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson, as ‘concern in establishing and guiding the next generation" in his ground-breaking 1950 work Childhood And Society, and he abbreviated it, some 30 years later, to: ‘I am what survives me.'

In essence the term describes ‘the innate human motivation to nurture and support future generations. Initially conceptualised as a stage primarily experienced during midlife, recent research has expanded the understanding of generativity as a significant development aspect throughout the entire adult lifespan.'*

Go Lin-Manuel!

In fact the older we get, paradoxically, it is often the less we are interested in our legacy,

as the same paper suggests:

‘As people age, their perception of time inevitably changes, leading them to focus more on emotionally meaningful goals with immediate rewards, which could potentially reduce involvement of adults in long-term generative goals as they are getting older. This could be especially detrimental in the context of relevant societal issues, as many currently pressing societal changes, such as environmentalism, require action whose impact tends to be delayed and evident only in the distant future…’

I sometimes wonder what the members of the MUC7 ‘ghost species’ believed they would be handing down to posterity? 

And whether our own species’ sole evolutionary bequest, 150,000 years from now, will be something like a genetic variant in our articular cartilage that allows us, and our descendants, to scratch our own backsides.

...plus, of course, the gazillions of poems, plays, and paintings, films, songs and novels, gardens, parks and architecture (ADD/DELETE AS REQUIRED) which we in The Business of Pleasure consign to that far off futurity...

Although the chances are that, given the apparent randomness of the longer-term posterity lottery, only Boney M., Fifty Shades and Ant & Dec will make it over the 150,000 year finishing line.  

But it would be nice to think that, in another leafy glade, a few hundred thousand years from now, the sound of Charles Aznavour’s Gauloises-gnarled voice might shimmy up between the stems of fifty-foot-high Sunflowers to bewitch the cyber-augmented ears of our descendants with his song, Hier Encore, in the English language version penned by Herbert Kretzmer, the genius translator-poet behind the lyrics of Les Misérables (which will probably still be playing somewhere in the galaxy).

Hier Encore / Yesterday When I Was Young

Yesterday when I was young

The taste of life was sweet as rain upon my tongue

I teased at life as if it were a foolish game

The way the evening breeze may tease a candle flame

The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned

I always built, alas, on weak and shifting sand

I lived by night and shunned the naked light of day

And only now I see how the years ran away

DT

18 February, 2026

 *Generativity across adulthood: how nature exposure and future time perspective shape motivation for social and ecological engagement.  Selma Korlat, Christina Ristl,  Jana Nikitin Australian Journal of Psychology, 2024

**Bryan Cranston is starring in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, with its underlying theme of legacy, at The Wyndham’s Theatre until 7 March

DT

18 February, 2026