There was
an item in the news earlier this month that two of the world’s most powerful
telescopes, the Hubble and the Spitzer, are operating in tandem to gather
images of the universe in its relative infancy, by focusing on galaxies more
than 12 billion light-years away (and hence, sending images to us more than 12
billion years old, in a universe that is currently estimated to be about 13.7
billion years old), and that there are plans for another telescope to gather
even older images in 2018, corresponding to events that occurred a mere
hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang.
This is just the most recent
example of an interesting phenomenon that occurs as our civilization continues
to evolve: we develop greater and greater capabilities for recapturing our
past. In 1993, moviegoers were
entertained by Jurassic Park
Even in our personal lives,
modernity has been giving us an increasing capability to retain and capture our
earliest past. The field of psychiatry
known as psychoanalysis, when it came into vogue at the end of the Victorian
era, suggested that we might resolve our most serious psychological issues and
lead more productive, happy lives if we delve deeply enough and far enough back
into our life histories, unearthing and resolving conflicts involving our
relationships as young children with our parents, and its practitioners engaged
in techniques that made it possible for us to do so. Technology has certainly helped us to
preserve more of our personal and social history, with the evolution of
photography, sound recording, and now, both sound and video recording with the
simple use of a smart phone. The
capability for recording, and storing, records of our individual and collective
lives has increased immensely in just the past generation.
Why is it, as we mature and move
forward in time, that we have a growing desire to recapture the past? The desire to preserve can certainly become
pathological, as currently illustrated in the American television program Hoarders, about persons who retain
nearly everything, and throw little if anything away. They seem to be desperate to hold onto
anything that has ever come into their lives.
I must confess that when I hear of stories like this, I look at my own
life and say “There but for the Grace of God go I,” because there are some
things that I have been very reluctant to throw away. It has been almost impossible for me to let
go of any book that I have ever owned, and so I find myself having to put an
additional bookshelf into my home about once every five years. (Perhaps Kindle will now save me from eventually
walling myself in with bookshelves, while at the same time making it even
easier for me to retain every book that I have ever read.)
In many, if not most, cases, I
think that the physical objects we hold onto provide tangible counterparts to
important events in our lives. Clearly
this is the case with wedding rings, or college diplomas, or birth certificates
of children. They give our memories of
these events substance: something that we can look at, and reach out and touch,
so that they are not just merely thoughts in our minds – thoughts which will
pass away when we pass away. Of course, the
meaningfulness of these physical objects is far from universal, and their value
is often completely lost on others, even those close to us. (Hence the ordeal of having to sit through a
presentation of somebody else’s stack of vacation photographs.) Many years ago, during an unhappy period of
my life, I was driving one morning to a workshop that I had to attend, and
stopped at a fast food restaurant for breakfast. The restaurant happened to be giving away
stuffed animals as part of a promotion for a new movie, and so I took one
before resuming my trip. And because it
was right around that time that the circumstances of my life improved rather
dramatically, the stuffed animal came to be permanently linked with a happy
memory for me. So to this day, the tiny,
smiling “lucky Simba” sits on a shelf in my bedroom. It will probably still be there on the day
that I die, and when the “junk” in my home is committed to the flames, like the
“Rosebud” sled in Citizen Kane, the
stuffed toy will be cast away without the slightest suspicion that it meant
anything to anybody. When I was a boy,
attending with my parents a holiday party at my grandfather’s house, I noticed
a large Bible sitting in a prominent place on a shelf in his living room. It just so happened that I had embarked on an
ambitious project that year to read the Bible from cover to cover, and so, in
order to impress my grandfather, I asked him if I could pick it up and read
it. To my shock (as well as that of my
parents, and the others in attendance), he angrily shouted at me not to touch
it. A while later, it was explained that
this Bible had been a prized possession of my grandmother, who had recently
passed away, and my grief-stricken grandfather had never wanted it moved from
the place where she had kept it. Of
course I didn’t understand his feelings then . . . but I do now.
What then, is it that compels us to
capture more of the past, and to retain it, through material objects? I think that we are always endeavoring to
give our individual and collective pasts a more enduring existence that we hope
will survive us, somehow, after the ephemeral imprints of our memories fade
away. And, by capturing more of our
pasts, we hope to compile a meaningful story of our existence, with a
beginning, middle, and end, which will endow it with a significance that will
transcend the transitory nature of our time on earth. Individually, and collectively, as nations
and as a species, we want to believe that we are part of a drama that has an
ultimate purpose – a destiny to be fulfilled, and by better understanding the
most distant reaches of our past, we hope to be better able to trace out the
trajectory of that drama.
In the Japanese film After Life, recently deceased persons
are directed to find a single happy memory, which they will then be able to
re-experience for eternity. Is that what
a real heaven might be: to collect a sort of “greatest hits” compilation of our
memories, and be able to relive them for eternity? For the German philosopher Nietzsche, such a
prospect, “eternal recurrence”, presented an ongoing challenge to live a
meaningful life:
What, if some
day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and
say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to
live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself
down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once
experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a
god and never have I heard anything more divine.' [The Gay Science,
§341]
In the same vein,
might we be forced to undergo a sort of trial in the afterlife, as in the
American film Defending Your Life,
and learn through this that the real secret of fulfillment had been to overcome
one’s fears, and live life to the fullest?
Will we have second, third, and multiple chances to do so, as in the
movie Groundhog Day?
Perhaps, with the continuing
advance of technology, we will someday be able to memorialize everything that
passed through our minds in a more permanent, substantial way. And then it will be possible for others to
recall each and every one of our lives, and review and examine them
completely. But even if this comes
about, what would compel anyone to do so?
The sheer number of individual human existences seems to undermine the
special value of what each of them had lived and experienced. Still, there is something precious about
every human existence, and perhaps when the capability is realized to see each
one in their fullest, then future lives will be enriched by reviewing them,
examining them, and drawing tangible lessons about how they spent their limited
spans of time on this planet. Maybe, in
this manner, future human beings will find the blueprint for living lives that
are truly worth preserving in memory, and even reliving, over and over and over
again.
