"I'm a middle-aged man . . . I've had to consider dying as a real thing, and I find my immediate reaction is this strange desire to leave behind monuments to myself, whether they come in the form of a book about bourbon or in letters to friends and family. The monuments we erect--shouting into the wind that we were once alive and had hopes and dreams--often end up becoming a shrine to the fallacy and futility of that desire itself."
Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last at 19 (N.Y., Penguin Press, 2020).