Mercy of the Longue Durée

The kindest thing time does to us is forget us.

We do not believe this, and we have built a century to prove we don’t. We produce ourselves into the record (posts, citations, named discoveries, foundations, the small empire of a personal brand), and we call the accumulation a legacy. But a legacy is a weight before it is anything else. We try, inside our narrow moral codes, to harm the fewest people we can; we get no say in how the survivors will file us. To want to be remembered is to hand strangers the right to decide who you were.

There is a relief available, and it is the one nobody advertises: we will be erased too. Time wipes the triumphs and the failures with the same cloth. A long enough look at the ancient dead turns out to be a consolation rather than a memento mori.

For most of a year I could not decide whether leaving a doctorate four chapters from the end was the worst decision of my life or the first honest one. I read Amanda Podany’s Weavers, Scribes, and Kings at exactly the wrong moment, which is how I know it was the right one. It is a history of the ancient Near East built almost entirely from cuneiform: weavers, scribes, priestesses, diplomats, the people who never sat in the seats of power, recovered from records made by and for the state that ruled them. It moved me more than it taught me, and I have been trying ever since to say why.

This is why. Until very recently, the book could not have existed. The languages themselves died. Sumerian and Akkadian were supplanted by Aramaic and Greek before the common era; cuneiform stayed unreadable until a century and a half ago; the hieroglyphs went silent from the Roman period until the nineteenth century. For most of recorded time the record itself was lost: kings and priestesses and whole cities waiting, unread, in the ground. What would it mean to spend a life acquiring fame, fortune, wisdom, honor, and have every bit of it go dark, not for a generation but for two thousand years?

Shelley already wrote the answer.

I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Even the remembering forgets. We do not have the king’s Egyptian name; Ramesses II reaches us as Ozymandias, a Greek approximation of a title. To be remembered, it turns out, is mostly to be mistranslated.

None of this should be romanticized. People suffered under Ramesses and Alexander the way people suffer under states now (it was the Assyrians who invented mass deportation as an instrument of rule), and forgetting is not the same as innocence. The point is not that the past was gentle. The point is that two writers, at opposite ends of the same long tradition, looked straight at the erasure and found it merciful.

The first is Qoheleth, the Teacher of Ecclesiastes:

Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. . . . A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. . . . The people of long ago are not remembered, nor will there be any remembrance of people yet to come by those who come after them.

The book knows everything fades and does not despair about it. It pours the wine and goes on.

The second is an emperor. Marcus Aurelius, writing the Meditations to no one but himself somewhere on the German frontier, keeps returning to the same correction: “People who are excited by posthumous fame forget that the people who remember them will soon die too. And those after them in turn. Until their memory, passed from one to another like a candle flame, gutters and goes out.” One man stood near the beginning of a wisdom tradition and one near the dusk of an empire, and they arrived at the same mercy: that everything fades, including the fading.

We are the first people to mistake that for a problem to be solved. We have built the machinery of total recall (every photo kept, every message archived, every life backed up twice) and called the inability to lose anything a kind of immortality. But a memory that keeps everything is not mercy; it is Funes, the man in Borges’s story who remembered every leaf of every tree he had ever seen and so could no longer think. Perfect memory is not the cure for death. It is its own affliction, and we have given it to ourselves on purpose.

Reconciliation to the way of things (the Stoics’ logos, Qoheleth’s vanity) is the discovery that you have been carrying a weight you were never asked to lift. The mercy of the long view is not that you will be remembered. It is that you won’t, and that this was always going to be all right.