Resident Evil

The word 'reside' comes from the Latin for 'to remain behind'. This is why, in Chemistry, a residue is 'that which remains behind' after a process (e.g. thermal decomposition, filtration) has been carried out.

A resident, therefore, is a person who remains behind, or who continues to dwell in a specific place. Some residents are biohazards; as they remain behind or continue to dwell in a specific place, they continue to exert the effect of their residency on the local environment.

It was a poet who wrote into the mouth of Marcus Antonius, "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." The fact is that monuments always remain, both good and bad. Of Sir Christopher Wren, the architect of St Paul's Cathedral in London, it was engraved, "Si monumentum requires, circumspice." Indeed, if you seek a monument to that great man, you only have to look around you in London.

But as the superior Archon said to me about somewhere else, "You look around in that place and you see all kinds of nonsense, eagles and rubbish." Those too are monuments, set up in a moment of vainglory. One might say, "You do not know the worth of a man until you see the monuments he leaves behind."

Besides Prometheus Unbound, my next most favourite piece of Shelley is Ozymandias. From that poem:

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.

I must say that I have seen all that in person. And yet, short years after I last saw that visage, it is passing — like the Egypt of Cleopatra, a proud but fading eminence.