To World Enough and Time.

Tonight, I've been thinking about time. It strikes me that, today, one's idea of forever has shrunk into a foreseeable future. In the past, civilisations have built their cities, written their words, carved out their art, on stone: solid, immovable. Stone is at once eternal, in its sense as a substance present in the world, and malleable. There are carvings and drawings and cities still visible now that have been present on this world for thousands of years. Admittedly, thirty-thousand turns around the sun is little, in the grand scheme of life, the universe and everything; but it seems an eternity compared to the longevity of things created now.

Time is a circuitous creature. I seem to remember it said, by someone, that history is perhaps retrospectively hinged on momentous occasions; such things as wars, coups, deaths and barbarians are the stuff for history books; but that history is really just made up of people's small actions. The more I see of the past during my studies, the more familiar it seems. I have heard it said in the media that we are living in a time of great change, of uncertainty, of the threat of war, of crises of faith, of injustice. When has that ever not been the case?

The present however seems, to me at least, more ephemeral in nature than in the past. Since writing began, people have written what they thought most important on paper, vellum, clay, papyrus, unconsciously bequeathing it to us in the future: an insight into their lives. In contrast, people nowadays write what they believe most important in computers. This is oddly meta-textual; even as I write this I realise that that is precisely what I am doing. When I have something to say, I commit it to this box, where it is filed and stored in a medium that is firmly situated in the now.

What will this entry be in thirty thousand years? A few corrupted disk segments, a little too much innovation, a new connective medium (at once more productive and totally different to the Internet) and this could be lost. Even now, I can remember floppy disks and tapes: things for which I would be hard pressed to find a person now with the means to read the information contained within them. Without the correct materials they are as blank, closed boxes. They're unintelligible.

How long ago were these things still in common use? Today, our work and writings, thoughts and lives, are immortalised to the tune of a generation or so. Today, there still live people of the era where LP's were the one main music medium; in fifty years this will not be so. There are children alive today, in this country, who have never giggled over the innuendo of the 'three and a half inch floppy'. Will we, in thirty thousand years, be the next great silent civilisation? Will there be those who, in years from now, batter at the long abandoned servers of the blogspot, and find it, like the original Command and Conquer servers of the gaming world, a ghost town?

Shakespeare wrote, with seeming confidence, in Sonnet 18: "But thy eternal summer shall not fade [...] When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st / So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." As far as anyone of the now can surmise from that ending, he saw his work, the written word, as eternal. Setting aside the vanity in such a conviction, he has been, so far, correct. I wonder if we can say the same, with the same confidence?



(Credit for the title to Andrew Marvell; for the ideas I credit the germs to Audrey Niffenegger and the history to Andrew Marr's History of the World series)