Memory & Remembrance

In one of my first college classes, my professor said something that has stuck with me ever since. "All great literature is about remembrance." And I have come to believe, from the Iliad to Coco, that this is largely true.

To remember and to be remembered is to be human.

The 9/11 memorial is a great example. Despite the dismay of the classicists, they chose to inscribe Vergil's quote, "No Day Shall Erase You From the Memory of Time," on the walls. When Ovid finished his masterpiece, the Metamorphoses, he wrote, "And now I have finished the work, which neither the wrath of Jove, nor fire, nor the sword, nor devouring age shall be able to destroy."

Reading carefully, I see remembrance as the core of all great literature, because it is the core of what it is to be human. To remember is to love. It is to honour the devotion of those who came before us through whose toil the great wealth of the world has become ours. It is a defeat of Time.

Whether any purpose that we value will be achieved, we cannot tell; but the drama itself, in any case, is full of Titanic grandeur. This quality it is the business of the historian to extract from the bewildering multitude of irrelevant details. From old books, wherein the loves, the hopes, the faiths of bygone generations lie embalmed, the author calls pictures before our minds, pictures of high endeavours and brave hopes, living still through their care, in spite of failure and death. Before all is wrapped in oblivion, the historian must compose afresh, in each succeeding age, the epitaph upon the life of Man.