mry writes

*a musing*

Most lives are unwritten, unrecorded, unacknowledged. Lost.

The history of most places is unwritten. Lost. Unseen.

Whichever way you point, whichever way you look, what you see, who you see, will one day be forgotten. The only question is when, not if.

We will all be lost; names no one remembers; lives no one recalls. We will be lost to time’s fading memory, to the cold shrug of a long-lived universe which has no regard for our petty little lives.

In my current life I am a writer; a wordsmith; a maker of occasionally coherent sentences.

I write not to be remembered; not to claim a place in history. I have no doubt my name, my writing, my thoughts, will all one day be lost. Still, I write; I have no fear of it being lost. I know any fear I might muster would be a useless waste of my time.

I write to claim my humanity, and to (perhaps egotistically) share a few thoughts and imaginings wrought by my feverish mind while I am here. If any of my words are read it will be a bonus. If any of my words are remembered it will be a miracle; this is not an expectation of mine.

A tome bearing my name on the cover and my writing within is buried deep within the archives of a library, where it rests, neglected, alongside its thousands of cousins. It will not last long; certainly not forever. The library, the tome, my name, all will one day be lost.

Some day this tome may be opened. Picked from the dusty shelves not to be read, but to be burned. Opened not for any knowledge within, for any learning it may advance, but to discover the degrees of heresy within. Opened by book burners fearful of knowledge they do not control, of thinking they do not control, of learning they do not control.

The heresy within is learned knowledge; thinking; discovery.

Knowledge is power is strength is enlightenment is revolution is discovery is independence is freedom.
To book burners and their ilk, each of these is reason enough for burning. Books; those who write them; those who dare read them. Burn them all.

And if the book burners do not prevail, time, the most patient power, will do the deed.

Most of my life is unwritten and all of it will be lost. The same is true for you. And her, and him, and them. The book burners, too; a small consolation.

Do not despair, for living now is the point. If we do not live now, while we have life, we can only leave nothing for which we might possibly be remembered. Not even a fossilized footprint. To leave a footprint, an imprint, requires action; it requires getting out in the world, tramping through the swamps and muck. To leave a record of our passage requires us to act, and even then all we are will be lost. This is true for the entire universe of we, past, present, and future.

History and memories, both personal and institutional, are fickle and ephemeral. The same is true for life. What remains when we are gone is fragmentary and incomplete. Perhaps true, but not the truth. Parts of a life, but not a life. Biased; non-representative. As they say, written by the survivors, the conquerors, the kings and queens. Justice demands they too be forgotten.

Remember this, or this too will be lost.