Footprints in the Sand

“Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and preserved the union”; Abraham Lincoln is dead. His legacy is a function of his mortality. “Now he belongs to the ages!” No one’s impact on the world is a ‘settled matter of fact’ until they are dead. Then it is irrevocable and immutable, albeit entirely unknowable and uncontrollable.

So, we strive to make our mark, to leave footprints in the sand in the hope that others will come along and make plaster casts of them. As I write this essay, I expect that it will be published online, that it will be boosted on social media, and that it may someday end up printed in book form. Absent those aspirations, would I continue to write this article? Probably not! 

By the age of 3 we’re already ‘helping’ Daddy in the garden and Mommy in the house. Of course, we have no interest whatsoever in helping. Asked to do something that would actually be helpful, like putting my toys back in the toy box, I’d disappear faster than a snowflake in July.

Our desire is not to ‘help’; it’s to ‘be someone’, to make a mark, to project some objectified version of ourselves into the world.  It doesn’t concern us that we’re making more work for our parents; we are only concerned that our grimy fingerprints be on the final product. 

When Grandma arrives for her annual visit, I can’t wait to let her know: “I helped Mommy bake the cake…and I helped Daddy grow the veggies.” I am someone, someone to be reckoned with, a 3 year old Wunderkind.  It certainly has not occurred to us yet, and it may never, that we are merely making the first shallow etchings on our gravestone.

Appropriately, homo sapiens marks its dead with inert memorials: piles of stones, giant pyramids, grave markers, and mausoleums. We are in awe of death. We dread it, and yet we never miss an opportunity to embrace it. We each build our own Taj Mahal and we begin construction early in life, very early.

“I just want to leave the world a little better than I found it.” What a wonderful sentiment! Who has not thought it…or said it aloud? Translation: “I want to be dead” (I want to be like Lincoln, I want to belong to the ages). I want to be mummified; I want to be a pillar of salt. Above all else, I want to endure and to get there, I’m more than willing to give up mortal subjectivity in exchange for objective immortality. Ridiculous? Yet true! I’m willing to give up my ability to experience the world in exchange for assurance that the world will experience me. Fame!  

My body is not what’s buried in the Blue Hills Cemetery; it’s not what’s sitting in an urn on some unlucky relative’s mantle. My body is ‘my body of work’ and it consists of all the wonderful contributions I’ve made to improve the dismal world I inherited; my efforts are deservedly memorialized in honorary plaques and dogeared birthday cards.  

Greco-Roman (classical) culture put enormous emphasis on ancestry, legacy, and fame. The rise of Christianity shifted the focus from ‘then and there’ (past & future) to ‘here and now’ (immediate) and ‘hereafter’ (eternal). 

Note: Immediacy and eternity are denotatively synonymous (‘one and done’), albeit connotatively distinct. Similarly, Roger Penrose has theorized that the Big Freeze and the Big Bang are denotatively (i.e., mathematically) identical. 

Ave Maria: “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen.” Now is the hour of our death! In essence, Christ abolished time. His coming is ‘perpetual’ as well as ‘historical’. Again, Incarnation and Second Coming are denotatively synonymous. Immediacy and eternity are two sides of one coin; history is the odd man out.

Having discovered, like Oppenheimer and Hawking, that time does not preserve but destroys, it is remarkable that we would let ourselves sink back into a fascination with our ‘place in history’. Has no one read Shelley:  “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; look upon my works ye mighty and despair…Nothing beside remains.”

But put nothing past the lure of the Renaissance or the power of the Enlightenment! Beginning with Machiavelli and ending with Marx, the Western world once again placed itself under the grand illusion of ‘naïve materialism’. It is for this reason that I refer to the period from 1500 to 1900 as the ‘Real Dark Ages’.  

The Renaissance and the Enlightenment devalued the immediate and the eternal and shifted focus back onto the temporal. It is as if a cosmic hypnotist rang a tiny bell on the New Year’s morning, 1500 CE, sending Western culture into a deep collective trance from which we did not wake until an alarm clock went off, rudely and unexpectedly, on 1/1/1900. A 400 year snooze! 

The prolific novelists of the 18th and 19th centuries gave way to Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. Newton and Laplace gave way to Einstein, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, and John Bell. Kant, Hegel, and Marx were replaced by Heidegger, Sartre, and Alfred North Whitehead. The art of David and Ingres was replaced by the works of Millet, Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso and Matise. Light again…at last!

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