Nonsense

With few exceptions, the last words of history’s great players have been irrelevant. We may expect pearls of wisdom from our dying artists, philosophers, and world leaders, but more often we are left with far less.
Admittedly, it’s not fair to expect deep insights into life’s mysteries when the dying clearly have other things on their minds—hell, for instance, or unspeakable pain. Bullet-riddled Francisco "Pancho" Villa was probably preoccupied when he told a comrade, "Don’t let it end this way. Tell them I said something." But don’t we have the right to expect eloquence in the final stanzas of legendary wordsmiths like Lord Byron and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe? Byron couldn’t be bothered to work up a decent rhyme: "Now I shall go to sleep. Good night." Goethe’s last words were so dull biographers have been obliged to edit creatively: "Open the second shutter so that more light may come in" became the more sublime "More light!" (There is, by the way, some debate wheth...