-Goalie-Stick-Glove-Ball.jpg)
A Few Thoughts on Impermanence
Something that has long amazed me is humans’ ability to convince themselves that things are permanent, unchanging, and capable of lasting forever. Here’s an interesting story about the effects that microbes are having on the 12th-century Hindu temple at Angkor Wat. We seem to think that somehow we can prevent the inevitable morphing of our physical world. In this story about Angkor Wat, the threat consists of microbes–-natural agents of change.
I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t try to preserve important treasures from our past. Indeed, such links to ancient worlds have much to teach us. At the same time, though, it’s useful to ask how long we can preserve those links and at what cost. Will the new techniques, especially genetically engineering new microbes, create more problems than they solve? Is it possible that developing some new microbial “antidotes” to the damage caused by other microbes will unleash harmful biological agents into the environment that will damage plant and animal life?
The article quotes biologist Ralph Mitchell:
“Our heritage is disappearing. Whether it’s Angkor Wat or the Mayan sites in Mexico or the Native American archaeological sites in the West of this country, they are all under threat. And the question is, can we preserve them?”
I agree that whether we can preserve those sites is a question, but not necessarily the question. We also need to be asking whether we ought to preserve them.
Humans are creating new products of culture every day, all over the world. I don’t think we can preserve all of them. Every day, some artifacts are likely to slip into a state in which we can no longer view, or perhaps even recognize, them. Is that necessarily a problem? I suppose it’s only a problem if we decide to make it one. Our desire to preserve everything seems rather silly when we consider the sheer enormity of the task. The more we create, the more there will be to preserve, and the more matter and energy we will need to preserve it all. Adding to that problem the need to race against time to fight the inevitable decay and erosion of those artifacts suggests to me that we’re fighting a losing battle.
The poet Shelley wrote movingly of this impossible battle in his sonnet “Ozymandias.”
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 shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d 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.
In a delicious irony, in just a few centuries, “Ozymandias” itself will likely be unintelligible in its original language to anyone but a small number of scholars who specialize in studying what we now call “Modern English.” Poetry doesn’t generally port well from one language to another. A well-crafted sonnet like “Ozymandias” will lose the beauty of its iambic pentameter–-a poetic meter very common in Modern English-–and its charming rhyme scheme with all its subtlety. I don’t know what the successor to Modern English will be, but if the past is an accurate predictor of the future, speakers of that later language will not read “Ozymandias” with the same appreciation we have when we read it today.
Of course, the new tongue–-let’s call it “Post-modern English”–-will have its own subtleties and beauties that would probably escape any of us who could see it now, if we could see it now. But that’s precisely the point. The full appreciation of products of human culture is tied to living in that culture, in its particular time and place. Any other appreciation is an approximation whose accuracy and rich meaning seem inevitably to diminish as one moves further away from the original time and place of the artifact’s creation.
Is there a lesson lurking in all of this? I believe so. The lesson is: enjoy it to the fullest here and now! Like everything else in our world, those cultural treasures are changing; they won’t always be with us in their current forms, so make the most of them today. Our universe is marked by impermanence. We may be able to preserve the treasures of the past a little longer through human effort, but we won’t be able to preserve them forever. The ancient phrase, carpe diem, captures this sentiment pithily; the urgency is real. Enjoy! Don’t wait!
Comments