For thousands of years, the transitory nature of human glory has been a favorite theme of authors, poets and songwriters. I remember having to memorize Shelley’s “Ozymandius” as a 15-year-old at Andover Academy (N.H.).

 

“And on the pedestal, these words appear:  My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,  Look at 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.”

 

That’s pretty in-tense reading for any high school freshman. As much to the point, and in a distinctly less formal vein, are these lyrics from Bruce Springsteen:

 

“Glory days, well, they pass you by, Quick as a wink from a young girl’s eye.”

 

And there’s the Latin phrase, “Sic transit gloria mundi.” (Thus passeth the glory of the world).

 

A few years ago I arrived at the Bromont (Que.) three-day event late in the afternoon, to coach some riders. The days are long at the time of the summer solstice, and there was still plenty of daylight to take a walk around the cross-country course before dusk.

 

The course begins on a rise of land and follows a parallel track to “Rue Gaspe,” the road that leads down the valley toward the spire of the Catholic church that towers above the tiny village. Between the track of the course and the road lie some large, white barns and some old sheds.

 

Next to one of the sheds, I found a large pile of junk lumber and debris, with small saplings and brush growing up through the tangle of boards. Some partially collapsed large, white boxes were jumbled in among the splintered planks. As I walked by, I noticed that one of the boxes had a large, black numeral “2” painted on it. I suddenly realized that I was looking at the victory podiums from the equestrian events at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, where our three-day and dressage teams “made history” by winning the team gold and team bronze medals.

 

Of all the things that I’d read or heard, or been forced to memorize, nothing was so hauntingly real to me as the sight of those rotting podiums in the fading June sunlight.

 

Only 20 years earlier, the focus of the entire equestrian world was riveted on those stands, topped as they were by exultant, medal-waving riders. Now, here they were, in Robert Frost’s words, fallen victim to “the slow, smokeless burning of decay.”

 

People forget very quickly, and it scarcely matters how triumphant your achievements may have been. Who were those medal winners who stood on those boxes, now 26 years ago? Except for the participants themselves, how many of the medalists can anyone remember, without looking it up in some record book? For that matter, who were the equestrian Olympic and World Championships medalists as recently as 1992 or 1994?

 

Each generation has its own crop of heroes, and new winners constantly come along to supplant the old. Only rarely does some titanic figure bridge the ages, but those are famous, usually, more as symbols than as flesh-and-blood entities: Babe Ruth, Man o’ War, Robert E. Lee, Secretariat.

 

Of course, these facts can make us depressed or even cynical, if we’re so disposed, but I think that the opposite reaction is more appropriate. We should simply accept that if we have our hour in the sun, that’s it. We get one hour, and we better enjoy it!

 

If one of us goes out in the coming months of the new year and wins novice, division B, at the East Blufarb Horse Trials, we should absolutely not be cool, blas