It’s a wonder that the Nobel Prize continues to exist to this day. The name lives on but Alfred Nobel is mostly forgotten by popular culture. Is that truly what making your mark on the world means? A token to your history and your lineage, your person all but erased. Sure, historians and more avid fans of the history of the Nobel Prize will keep some semblance of his life alive, but this is a drop in the bucket when it comes to the general population.
So, is it even worth it to act in such a way to try and leave a lasting legacy? Can you even guarantee you will leave a lasting legacy if you are not part of the aristocracy?
One Welsh man whose name is burnt into my memory is Aneurin Bevan, the architect of the NHS and socialist. I know of his political affiliations and am grateful for his work in securing and establishing the UK’s national healthcare system but know little of the actual person. At the very least he was a ‘commoner’, not a member of the British elite, which represents a stark difference to the majority of well-known British figures. It’s almost a guarantee that if you were to look into a famous British historical figure you can track back their ancestral line, see the public school they attended, likely Eton, and their university, likely Oxford or Cambridge. Will we ever see a time in the UK when the aristocracy becomes as irrelevant as the average person?
Today's prompt: Nobel Prize
If you'd like to participate too, the contest can be found here: @mariannewest/day-1588-5-minute-freewrite-friday-prompt-nobel-prize
A bit of a different freewrite today. It was a bit hard to think of a way to link the very real and historical Nobel prize with my fictional tabletop RPG world, so I decided to just noodle about the philosophy of legacy and the injustices of the class system.