I hope you will like it and remember me by it long after I am gone
Recently, on a whim, I picked All Quiet on the Western Front. Something I hadn’t read since I was a teenager, I thought I’d see how it held up.
But when I opened the book and looked at the insider cover I found this inscription.
I’d completely forgotten this book was mine, and that it had been a gift from my grandmother. Something she had read in her youth and thought I would equally enjoy now I was old enough.
It was that last line that hit me.
I hope you will like it and remember me by it long after I am gone.
I do remember her. I have uncountable wonderful memories of her that remain, years since her death.
But those memories will only last as long as I do.
All my grandparents have passed on. With the recent passing of my Great-Aunt, that entire generation of my family is gone.
And I’m left dwelling on how they will linger. Their lives live on in my memories, and those of my family. But, eventually, we will pass on in turn and those memories will be lost forever.
And I think about how many similar memories must have faded from the world when my grandparents died? Childhood memories of their own parents and grandparents. Personal recollections of times we call the distant past but to them felt like yesterday. There may be photos in some drawer, or accounts written down in a forgotten diary, but all personal experience of them as people has passed from the world.
I've heard this called "The Second Death"; when finally all memory of us is gone from the world. (If you have seen Pixar's Coco, it has a beautiful portrayal of this concept).
The past doesn’t die. It will always be there. But eventually, it becomes another world.
Take, for example, take my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.
Jame Brand was a London brushmaker in the 1800s. A very successful one. A respectable business owner with premises on the main road into London from the south in Southwark. In those days, this was the place to be, as all traffic into the city came through that way.
If I wanted I could head to Southwark and walk the same streets he would have. I could look at buildings he would have looked at. I can go into the parish church he helped fund the construction for.
But despite all these similarities, these shared locations and spaces, the world he lived in seems almost fictional to me.
I am fascinated with history. Especially how we conceptualise it.
It’s easy to think of history as a place separate from our world. The people and events we learn about are somehow separate from us. Not real, at least in the sense that people and events happening now are real. If anything, we think about "The Past" as a fictional world. We learn what happened in those times as narratives, as we would a novel set in Middle Earth or Narnia.
But that wasn’t the case for them.
To me, these images are from the past, but to the people alive back then, that was the “now”. They wouldn’t have been able to imagine how those streets would look a century later, just as the way it looked a century ago looks unreal to me now. And in one-hundred, two-hundred, or more years later, people will look at photos of me the same way.
How do you get your head around that?
It’s easy to get my head around how much has changed in the last century. It's how much is exactly the same that's hard to process.
Growing up in England, I’ve sat in houses that have had the same layout and features for literally hundreds, if not thousands of years. And not just National Trust or historical properties. I’m talking about visiting friends whose childhood homes dated back centuries.
Even the history of more modern buildings boggles the mind. My childhood home was built as recently as the 1910s. My bedroom was one of the original rooms. I came to that room as a newborn, so to me has always existed in, more or less, its current state. But how did it feel to the person who first moved in when the house was built? Or any of those who occupied this space for the 70 odd years before I arrived?
And when they went to the shops, they walked along the same streets and when into the same buildings as I would today.
So many times in my life I have stepped into a building and realised I'm standing in the same spot, looking at the same features, as someone would have done during the war. Or the Victoria era. Or during the reign of the Tudors. Or even earlier? My local church, for example, has been on the same sight for almost a millennium.
The world is filled with these shared locations and places, stretching out through history.
This post got away from me a little. I meant to write something short about how nice it was to find a forgotten message from my grandmother. Instead, I've gone on a deep dive into my love of history.
But it’s my blog, and I’ll write what I want.
Ultimately, we have to live in the time we are born to. It isn’t inherently better than any time in history that came before. I mean, hopefully it is because humanity slowly grows and improves, but that’s not time itself.
Our time becomes what we make of it.
But it’s important to remember that to those who were around then, the past was real in a way we can’t quite picture.
And it’s also important to remember those that cared for us. We might dream about immortality, but the best we could have is to be remembered fondly by those we leave behind and hope they go on to live fulfilling lives.
And little things, like an inscription in a book, might remember us to them long after we are gone and bring a smile to their face.
