The timeless story of Ozymandias -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias -- (if you don't know the 1818 sonnet by Shelley, read it before downvoting. It's relevant and timeless)
I 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 these 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".
EDIT: Thanks for the link to the excellent Breaking Bad video. For what it's worth, I haven't seen an episode since season 3 so didn't realize the coincidence. My pop culture connection would have been to Watchmen.
The poem is itself ironic... it's about Ramses III who rule c. 1000 BC and yet was famous enough that poetry would be inspired by him 3000 years later.
I agree. When I was younger, I only got the obvious message about the transience of material accomplishment. The poem is more multifaceted than that.
One starting place is to think about the layers of interpretation (Ramses -> sculptor -> traveler -> narrator). Everyone concerned is still talking, in different ways, about the memory of Ramses.
As long as we're on the topic, here's one of my favorite expressions of parallels between us and people in the past:
Am I the only one around here...
Who was not educated by pop culture references,
But actually remembers reading this in school?
Yeah, yeah, I get it, it's fun when we find subtle references to pop culture in the greater world around us. But it just seems wrong when the pop reference replace the actual culture (or maybe the irony is so subtle as to seem non-ironic, ironically--or something).
Somebody should update the wikipedia page with a "References in Pop Culture" section.
Right, but since then, we've attempted to give everyone a liberal arts education. But many are resistant to that and prefer the teat of the entertainment industry.
Nothing wrong with hearing about something on TV and googling it (Wikipedia has revolutionized instant knowledge in this way). It's the people who don't dig deeper and don't realize the prior reference and deeper meaning to begin with. And so it seems like they're missing the subtle reference to the real world in the TV show.
Seems a bit of an extrapolation, no? I never read Ozymandias in school, but I'm certain I've read very worthwhile literary works you've yet to read also. The notion that not having read some arbitrary, singular work implies general cultural ignorance is, well, about as silly as the statement sounds. It's almost as if different places and different times have different things in their English curricula! ;)
Going from "has not read a particular work" to "prefers the teat of the entertainment industry" is a bit of a leap.
I 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 these 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".
EDIT: Thanks for the link to the excellent Breaking Bad video. For what it's worth, I haven't seen an episode since season 3 so didn't realize the coincidence. My pop culture connection would have been to Watchmen.