Whatever it is you hold dear—the television shows, the books, the music, the digital whispers that flicker through the web—will, in time, fade into oblivion. In twenty years, perhaps a century at most, the relics of our era will either be relegated to the obscurity of dusty university archives or become the detritus of history, discarded and forgotten, in some landfill. It is a sobering thought, but a necessary one.
What cultures choose to remember, and more crucially, what
they do not, tells us far more than any historical record. History’s memory is
selective, often cruelly so. Looking back, only a small handful of works—be
they texts, songs, or visual art—are preserved across generations. There is a
quiet violence in this forgetting, a process in which the bulk of a
civilization’s intellectual and creative output is swept away like grains of
sand in the tide. Much is preserved in the vaults of academic institutions and
the minds of specialized scholars, but the masses, those who shape the present
and future, hold only a fleeting few fragments.
Most modern people could likely name only one or two books
from the 19th century; the ones that somehow survived the filters of time and
culture. Those few that have been elevated beyond mere words on a page to
become mythic, immortalized in the form of films, television shows, and
repeated cultural references: Dracula, Frankenstein, etc. These titles
are not simply remembered; they have seeped into the very fabric of our
collective consciousness, like sigils charged with meaning that transcend their
original form. And yet, the average person may not even know that these were
once mere books. Few would even venture to name Great Expectations, and
yet it too—like so many others—was once the cultural currency of its time.
It is a paradox—our historical memory is minuscule in
bandwidth, and in that slender space, it clings to the few works that have come
to speak for an entire era. Often, the works that are remembered are not the
ones that were celebrated in their time, but rather those whose ideas, when
revisited by future generations, echo the changing values of those who look
back. It is not always the loudest or most famous voices that endure. Often, it
is the writers and artists whose visions were dismissed or rejected by their
contemporaries—those on the fringes of culture—who find themselves resurrected.
These creators become, for a time, icons of a future that sees in them
something of themselves. But of course, this too is ephemeral. For just as one
era elevates these voices, another might tear them down.
The 19th century was a time of explosive cultural creation,
but much like a Tibetan sand mandala, it has been scattered by the inexorable
winds of time, leaving behind only a few works chosen to represent the era,
often distorted by the very stereotypes we project onto them. These works are
at constant risk of revision and sanitization. The current wave of historical
revisionism sweeping across our culture—where older works are rewritten to
align with contemporary sensibilities—is a reflection of a society cut off from
its roots. We now live in an age where information and technology have severed
us from the past, and the past is no longer something we build upon, but
something we seek to erase, to revise, to rewrite. We see this in the recent
censorship of writers like Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, and Salman Rushdie, whose
works are now being rewritten to fit the ideological mold of the present. We
see it in the ongoing campaign to remove the works of “dead white
men” from the cultural canon.
This is not mere nostalgia for a lost past—it is something
deeper, darker. A culture adrift, without the anchor of historical continuity,
has no future but the one that the current powers, those who control the flow
of information, deem fit for us. It is a culture of erasure, of rewriting the
story of who we are. A culture unmoored from its past is, by definition, doomed
to perpetual reinvention, caught in a cycle of intellectual amnesia. One can
almost feel the shuffling of the sacred alphabet—the rearrangement of the
symbols that make up the grand sigil of humanity.
As we stand on the precipice of this new century, awash in
the endless tide of data and media that defines our information-saturated
world, it is impossible not to wonder: what will survive? In a sea of content,
from YouTube videos to streaming shows, from viral tweets to podcasts, what
pieces of our cultural mosaic will be remembered by future generations?
I suspect that, against all odds, the Harry Potter
books will endure. Though the winds of political correctness have already begun
to blow fiercely against them (for good reason), these stories—a sweeping narrative about the
battle between good and evil—will likely continue to be read and re-read, their
magic undimmed by the fading prejudices of our era. Just as Dracula has
lived on through the decades, so too will these books. They captured the
collective imagination of their time, and I suspect they will retain their
place in the cultural pantheon, albeit perhaps in a more diluted form, thanks in large part to the author's TERFdom. The
Road, Cormac McCarthy's haunting meditation on survival, humanity, and
despair, will likely stand alongside Harry Potter, not as a tale of
triumph but of the primal endurance of the human spirit—an essential text for
the dark days that may come.
Television, however, may be another matter. Perhaps Twin
Peaks will survive, though not necessarily because of its historical
importance or narrative genius. It endures, I think, because it was a product
of its time—an era in which we, as a society, turned our gaze back on an
America that no longer existed, one we rejected even as we fetishized it. It
represents our desire to look at the past with both longing and scorn, to tell
ourselves that we are smarter, more enlightened. Perhaps The Simpsons,
too, will endure in some form, a cultural artifact of the postmodern age,
capturing our era’s contradictions in a single animated frame. And let us not
overlook The Wire—a television epic that unflinchingly revealed the
underbelly of society, exposing the rot in our systems of power and control.
Its exploration of the fragility of institutions and the complexity of human
nature will likely echo far beyond its own time, enduring as a touchstone for
anyone seeking to understand the nature of our modern urban landscape.
But in the end, I suspect that the true touchstone of this
era will not be found in the sprawling, mass-market works we consume today, but
in something far more ominous, more prophetic: the works of those whose voices
were raised in warning against the consequences of our age—figures like George
Orwell, whose exploration of the mechanisms of control and manipulation
feels even more relevant now than when it was first penned. Orwell’s stark
clarity about the forces that shape our modern world, much like the reflections
of others who foresaw the rise of the machine and the perils of technological
dominance, may ultimately become the touchstones of future generations, who
will look back and see in them not just the critiques of their time, but the
warnings that foresaw our present. It is, perhaps, in these works that the
alchemy of history is revealed, the transformation of the base material of the
present into the gold of future understanding.
The grand hope for the Internet was that it would serve as a
vault for humanity’s collective knowledge. And yet, what we have instead is a
landscape where our intellectual heritage is being sifted through the
algorithms of corporate gatekeepers. What was once a vast and free-ranging
space for creativity and discourse is becoming, more and more, a controlled
narrative, curated and shaped by forces whose interest is not in truth, but in
control. The work of preserving culture is no longer in the hands of individuals,
of sages or scholars, but in the hands of corporate entities and the vast,
anonymous machinery of artificial intelligence. What was once a flame of
freedom now flickers in the shadow of unseen hands.
If we are to preserve any semblance of what truly matters,
we must take it upon ourselves to safeguard our intellectual and artistic
heritage. The books you love, the ideas that shape your worldview, the voices
you hold dear—these will be forgotten unless you act. Hold onto them, share
them, cherish them. For in the end, what is preserved by you will be preserved
for you. The future, with all its possibilities and perils, will decide what is
remembered. And yet, even amidst the decay, there are always those fragments of
the past that will somehow persist, enduring as echoes in the vast hall of
human experience, as the work continues—the sacred task that each of us, in our
own way, must take up, adding brick by brick, until the edifice is complete.
The stones are scattered, the symbols lie hidden—but those who seek will find
the Light.
