A sad note from cyberspace. While visiting an online forum, I found this plaintive request [names and date changed]: "Hi: My name is Jane Doe, John's wife. I am asking a favor. Is there a way to take John's name off the forum's email list. He passed away on 12 Aug 08 after a long hard fight with a
brain tumor. I would really appreciate your help. Just kinda hard still seeing him get emails. I am trying to let people know slowly."
My mother died suddenly, stricken in the afternoon, rushed to the hospital, and gone that night. In the confusion, no one called either of her sons--living out of town--until after she was dead. My brother and I arrived at her Brooklyn apartment the next morning. In the TV room, my childhood bedroom, from where there was a clear view of the still standing World Trade Center (I though later of her being spared watching them collapse), there sat a cold cup of tea and browning apple slices--the remains of her last day. A simple clean up and they were gone.
When someone dies, there are these types of short-lived artifacts. Half-eaten food, soiled clothes, an open book, an unfinished crossword--soon to remain only in frail, human memory.
But the internet goes on forever. I first noticed the Jane Doe note a few months ago, and when composing this post, I checked, and it was still there. It will probably remain there a year from now, and years from now after my own demise.
I am old enough to have seen I Love Lucy when it originally aired, and as its broadcast signals travel deep into space it's possible that just now some aliens are firing up their TVs, sitting on whatever passes for couches, and watching Lucy and Ethel trying to keep up with that infuriating candy assembly line.
Last year, Doritos blasted a commercial at the nearest possible solar system in a publicity stunt. It's likely both Lucy and Doritos will degrade into the cosmic noise, and I was more of a Jackie Gleason than Lucy fan. Alice was going only as far as "to the moon."
Not all records of human activity remain with us. Who knows what ancient clay tablets will never be uncovered from their Mesopotamian ruins? When I was an undergraduate, I took a course in ancient Greek philosophy. My professor, H. Standish Thayer--who died around the same time as John Doe but at the far more advanced age of 85--had a little routine that went something like this.
"Today we are going to talk about Aristoxenus--a Greek who lived in what is now Puglia, Italy--the arch between the toe and heel. He believed that the soul is to the body as music is to a musical instrument. He lived in the 4th Century BC. They say he wrote 453 books. What happened to them?"
And like a well-rehearsed Greek chorus, we would reply: "All burned up in the Library of Alexandria fire."
I googled Professor Thayer and there remains, as they will forever, his wedding announcement, 1958, and the memorial service fifty years later.
Other records will be gone because who will have the machine to read a floppy disk or listen to a LP two-hundred years from now?
I tell my kids about the phonograph and they smile as if saying, "There goes old Dad again." Will I ever set up the turntable to play the White Album for them? Will they ever set it up--if they could figure out how--to listen to it themselves?
What's on our local hard drives may be as lost as Aristoxenus or moldering letters in some humid attic.
I grew up at a time when the telephone was the most advanced form of communication. I recall essays on the lost art of correspondence. But not to worry. Nobody talks on the evanescent telephone anymore, when you could text or email, restoring the record for archivists, historians, and dissertation writers.
Life ends, and when you're dead you're dead eternal, but Lucy, Gleason, and Doritos are still traveling into space--however degraded, Mrs. Doe's post lives on past her too young to die husband, this post too will endure--whether you read it or not--and the internet goes on forever.
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If you want to hear my Brooklyn accent live, I will be interviewed by Keidi Obi Awadu on Libradio.com, Wednesday, March 4th, at 10am Eastern Time.
Read my letter that appeared in the NY Times today on gay marriage, and why it is too conservative and too traditional. Click here, and scroll down to second letter.
