Why don’t I begin?
It is a great honor, and also a burden, to come into the possession of the memory of other beings. Memory is not only a compass through time. It endears us to our world.
As I was reminded of the memory of my old flatmate, Webster the Spider, who lived by the back door on the terrace overlooking the city, I felt chagrined for forgetting such a memory in the space of only a year—just as I forgot to liberate Webster when I moved out of the apartment in rather a frenzied flurry, thus resigning her to a slightly earlier demise than would otherwise have come to pass.
That spider didn’t care about me. I scared it on the few occasions I drew too close. It was one spider out of countless billions, and it made a very hearty go of spreading its genes to posterity. I doubt it was the last of its line. My memory of Webster was not significant to Webster, but only to me. Webster didn’t do anything except do a good job at being a spider in my conspicuous view.
So what’s all this gobbledegook about memory? Let’s begin with the obvious. Webster made a difference in my life. She was my mascot spider for my Spider Appreciation Program, to come to terms with my arachnophobia. I enjoyed watching her go about her daily life. Webster brought me satisfaction and insight.
The memory of others is not an honor for others’ sake. Some of the living appreciate being remembered, often deeply so, but more of the living do not or can not, and the dead never can. It is an honor for us, if we are able to perceive it. We are the privileged audience to life on Earth. If there were another planet harboring life, and you were among the first generation to be able to go visit it, wouldn’t you feel privileged?
It’s no different here. Perhaps it’s even more of an honor here, because this is our world. We are related to essentially every living thing on it.
Ultimately, all of us will be completely forgotten. Our descendants will throw out our heirlooms. Our imprints upon society will drown in the ocean of Civilization. You might care deeply about your parents, your grandparents, even your great grandparents. But what do you know about your great-great-great grandparents? Did they name their animals? Did they like chicken soup? What did they do when it rained?
It won’t be long before the word Caesar becomes an untranslatable enigma. The atoms of the universe will crumble and a freezing haze will obscure the void for ever. That is the end, unless our science is severely flawed or our mettle severely underestimated. In any case, we won’t be around to see it. “Heaven” is a faerie-tale, not to console the downtrodden about the end of all things, but to console them merely about their lives right now. People want to be remembered. They want a happier story in another time and place. How tenuous our resilience, then, and how negligible our capacity for despair, when we consider the enormity of the universe and its inexorable march towards night. The resolution of the Cosmos—the intricacy and the extent of it—is almost inconceivable.
But that is the easy part. Seeing the end of the universe, though it takes extraordinary courage and clarity, is easy. Much harder, I say, to comprehend the universe itself. Much harder to appreciate it. Our centric existence makes it very hard indeed to see what all else there is beyond the scope of our narrow fixations outside our personal world of the mind. Not that humans are abjectly bad at it, but there’s a lot to see, and it’s very hard to schedule it in between sleeping and work. Most humans have never had the chance to try at length. What a loss! If you cannot appreciate the universe, you will never be able to appreciate yourself as you otherwise could.
It is the memory of others, I think, which puts this Illumination within our closest grasp. The memory of others, human or not, is unique. By that I mean there is nothing else like it. All life on the Earth is kindred. We share a common ancestor. We share a common world. And, for as strangely different as I don’t doubt them to be, we share many common experiences. If you can remember a spider in its web, then, my friend, you have found a lovely thing to call your own. (Would you believe I am shedding tears at this point? That is why you must write, and not simply read others’ work!) And when you can see yourself in the spider—though I do not mean drawing a human face on it, but relating to it despite your vastly different natures—then you will experience an incredible bond, a oneness, a sense of togetherness which has given rise to whole religions, and nobler things, in every form of art and all philosophies. So many humans have tried to describe the experience of it!
But it is unique.
The universe does not tell us what is meaningful and what is not. There is no “particle of meaning.” We get to decide for ourselves, in the space of our own minds. This is a legacy of our evolutionary adaptations over the ages. It is a potent power. By the memory of others, we come to connect our existence into the web of the Earth, and from there out into the Cosmos where earthly life has yet to reach. Perhaps there is no better way to appreciate yourself than to see yourself in something utterly outside your dominion. The experiences of those who came with us, and who came before us, endear us to our world and enlighten us to our own nature. There is very little you can do that has not already been done since time beyond memory. (Take pleasure in those rare luxuries where you can!) Though true it is that you are always, deep down, truly and totally alone, so too are you never alone at all. It is the difference between your sole possession of the world of your mind, and your communal existence as a denizen of the Earth. Both are comforts, when you take them together.
Memory itself is a precious resource, finite and fleeting. It is amazing that this universe would be able to partake of itself even in a small way, but such is the power of a sentient being. With our memory, we ponder our existence for a while, and we remember, haphazardly to say the least, the way things are in our day. We are visitors here, for a short while, and the memory of our days and nights is the only souvenir we get to take with us.
The memory of others is an honor because, unlike memories of personal experiences or memories of inanimate things, the memory of others connects you to beings that are truly like you. If knowing a second language brings a new dimension to your understanding of culture, then knowing that other beings share your most basic experiences brings a new dimension to your understanding of existence. As surely as your own life has irreplaceable worth—not the worth we often presume of ourselves, as masters of the world and chosen people of a higher power, but the worth we have as creatures who lived a sentient experience—so too is the memory of others irreplaceable.
And the memory of others is a burden because they will never come again. If these others were significant to us, or even if they were not, the loss is almost incalculable—as befits our universe’s magnificent enormity. Once they die, we are privileged to carry on their memory a little while longer, like the silence after a song.
Until next time in Ask a Master of Human Character, may you be remembered.
