Specks On The Wall

The notion that memory is but a weird elastic was captured by Lance Morrow in this portion of his essay The Fire Hose Of History:

“Robert Frost wrote a poem called ‘Out, Out —-’ in which a boy using a buzz saw to cut stove wood is momentarily careless and cuts his own hand off, and then dies of shock. The others in the farmyard are stunned. But Frost ends the poem with an interesting chill:

And they, since they

were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.”

Such it is when it comes to so much of history as even that so-called “a day that will live in infamy” eventually faded into little more than a factoid as we, not being the ones dead, so quickly turned to our own affairs. To the young, Vietnam today might just as well be the Punic Wars. So it is when it comes to the grand sweep of history. So it is when it comes to individual lives.

So, then, whence comes this vague sense of one’s importance, of significance, of permanence? Maybe think in terms of life as a kind of performance art – believing other people are watching you, judging you, thinking about you. They aren’t. They’ve long turned to their own affairs. I probably wasted three decades thinking otherwise.

No matter your station in life, you likely had a counterpart in some civilization of the ages. You know as much about their individual lives as some future life-form will know about yours. Where are they now, Marcus Aurelius used to ask. Where are the ambitious emperors who came before me? Where are the angry people? Where are the warriors? Where are the rich and powerful? Where are the paranoid and the anxious? They’re all gone. Soon you will be too.

How many of you display pictures of your parents on the wall – half? Of grandparents – a quarter? The point of specks on the wall is the way our individual lives, so big, so important, so forever in the present tense, simply fade after a generation or two, to be remembered, if at all, by a framed picture on some off-spring’s wall. You are but one tiny thread in the fabric of the ages.

Let’s discuss: Speak to the speck ‘cause the face don’t wanna listen.