History and the Passing of Time

My grandmother, Rosa Corace, with her grandfather, Rocco Ghilardi, in 1927.

“This thing all things devours;
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats mountain down.” JRR Tolkien

Perhaps subconsciously, most people believe that they will leave some kind of a mark in the world—some legacy, however minor, that will carry through the generations. At the roots of it is the desire for our existence to have the kind of meaning that survives our physical bodies. Studying history is not conducive to holding on to this belief.

To test this, all you have to do is think about your family. If asked about our parents and grandparents, most of us will have a lot to say and would be able to fill the stories of their lives with plenty of details. Things get considerably less precise once we move onto our great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents. Maybe, we remember their names, where they were born and what they did for a living. But that’s usually as far as it goes. All we know about them can typically be summed up in three lines. Their entire earthly existences as known by their direct descendants… in three lines. Turn one or two generations further back, and our knowledge drops to nothing, or something close to it.

In his excellent study The Horse, The Wheel and Language, author David Anthony writes,

“It is disconcerting to realize how few of our ancestors most of us can recognize or even name. You have four great-grandmothers, women sufficiently close to you genetically that you see elements of their faces, and skin, and hair each time you see your reflection. Each had a maiden name she heard spoken thousands of times, and yet you probably cannot recall anyone of their maiden names. If we are lucky, we may find their birth names in genealogies or documents, although war, migration, and destroyed records have made that impossible for many Americans. Our four great-grandmothers had full lives, families, and bequeathed to us many of our most personal qualities, but we have lost these ancestors so completely that we cannot even name them. How many of us can imagine being so utterly forgotten just three generations from now by our own descendants that they remember nothing of us-not even our names?”

Probably, someone will carry on our DNA a century or two from now, but will otherwise know nothing about the very people who made their existence possible. All the experiences we lived through, all the highs and the lows, the emotions that shook us to the core, the values we held sacred… next to none of that will survive in anybody’s consciousness.

99.99999% of anyone who ever lived left no traces. No one knows they ever existed. The pages of history record nothing of what they did, what they felt, and who they were. And even for those who found their way into history books, the information is usually extremely thin and known by few. Ask teenagers today about the people who were household names just a hundred years ago. At best, they are shadows moving at the edges of their knowledge. More likely, they are entirely gone.

Time is indeed a cruel mistress.

And this isn’t true just for people. Think of the language that I’m writing in at this moment. A century or two from now, the same sentences you are reading will sound archaic-sounding and odd. Three or four centuries from now they’ll barely be understandable. A few more centuries later, no one other than students of ancient languages will have any idea of what they mean. Mastering any language is like building sandcastles during low tide. No matter how beautiful your creation, it will be swept by the tides shortly. The same can be said of most human achievements.

We may recoil in horror at the realization that almost nothing we do will leave any kind of a legacy. A less depressing way to look at it is that perhaps we don’t have to take ourselves so damn seriously. Do whatever you can to bring a smile in the lives of those close to you. Other than that, play more and stress less, for there’s no future reward for missing out on joy today.