Immortality

Immortality

The definitions of immortality are either immunity from death, or living forever. The first might make for a pretty boring life, as many of the things we do are spiced with danger, and if you couldn’t die that would eliminate an awful lot of what we find dangerous. I’m going to set aside the possibility of being maimed or paralyzed for the rest of eternity.

It is the second definition that has caught my attention today.  Now perhaps the idea of living forever might be appealing to some, but as I’ve aged and my body has found more and more ways of failing to perform according to the original specifications I’m pretty sure that living forever could be a very painful way to watch the world go by.

Rather, I was thinking about the way that things have changed in the last hundred or so years. You are reading this through an electronic medium. (Unless you’re standing behind me reading this over my shoulder.) Throughout history (Side Note #1: For this piece to make any sense what-so-ever we have to be talking about written history.) we have communicated through speech, writing, or pictures.  This has resulted in a lot of clutter, or as we collectors call it memorabilia. I have in boxes somewhere in this house, letters that I received while I was serving overseas. I have letters that my father wrote to me after I moved away and we were separated by a thousand miles. I have copies of studies and papers that I wrote decades ago. All of these are on paper. (Side Note#2: Yes, I know about microfiche and microfilm, but let’s be serious here. Who has a reader in their house, or the time to run down to the local library every time you want to see if your great aunt’s recipe for banana bread used one or two eggs?)

After you’ve read this you will go on to another site and you will have no record of what you have read. (Side Note #3: That is unless you have taken my advice of some months back and saved all of this stuff to your computer just in case I someday become a famous writer.) We basically know the thoughts of other people from the past by what they have written. Sometimes that can be creative and sometimes just remembered. Take our friend William Shakespeare, or Will to his friends. If his plays had been performed and not written down, the audiences who saw them at the Globe Theater might have a memory of the play but we in the 21^st century would never have had the pleasure of reading Romeo and Juliet.

Books are a wonderful way of keeping the words of others for all time. But even those can be supplemented by letters written by the authors. Those letters often add clarity and meaning to the words put into the books. Not to mention they are a great source of the gossip of the day. Letters written to lovers, brothers, and others can tell of the feelings and opinions of the writer as no formal recitation can match. (Side Note #4: Here we have to separate the written word placed on paper and shipped through the mail or messenger, from that which has arrived as E-mail. For it is only the very best of us who remember to save separately the important “letters” we have received through the E-Mail system. The rest of us become disgusted as we realize that we now have fifteen pages of E-mails in our in-box, and choose to delete the last five years of messages. Only to later remember that the only place we had where our fathers named the dog that we had when we were babies was in that letter he wrote the year before he died.)

If you don’t believe in the value of letters just go back to one written by Pliny the Younger, where he wrote about surviving the eruption of Vesuvius. “In addition, it seemed as though the sea was being sucked backwards, as if it were being pushed back by the shaking of the land. Certainly the shoreline moved outwards, and many sea creatures were left on dry sand. Behind us were frightening dark clouds, rent by lightning twisted and hurled, opening to reveal huge figures of flame. These were like lightning, but bigger.”  Now that’s something you don’t get from the Disney version of the event. Truly “you had to be there.”

Not only letters tell what the writer is feeling. Some of us keep diaries, where we record our most intimate thoughts. Alright perhaps not intimate, but certainly personal. At some point we’ve all probably read the “Diary of Ann Frank.”  She wasn’t preparing a tome for the ages, or a magazine article that would be passed through an editor. She was a frightened girl, in hiding, and afraid for her life. She had paper and pen and the will to record her thoughts. Those thoughts tell of her feeling as she had them and not a rendition of what some might have remembered long after the war. Memories are fleeting and altered by later perceptions of the events.

What does all of this have to do with “immortality?” Do people who write letters live longer? No, and in Ann Frank’s case they barely had time to live at all. What the letters and diaries provide is a form of immortality. Those memories of their thoughts and feelings live beyond them and remain accessible to us, as if they were standing right here with us in the room. They provide an opportunity to listen to them, even though they are no longer here with us.

So close up this site and get paper and pen. Write a letter to your friend, your brother, lover. Considering what we’re celebrating this weekend, make it a letter to your mother. Tell them how you feel, and ask how they are doing. You might even ask your mother the name of that dog.