Some Things Should Die

The Abrahamic religions have a contemplative proverb that goes, “For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” In Christian mass, this line is recited every year on Ash Wednesday as a reminder of one’s humility, insignificance, and most principally, mortality. Nothing is permanent, yet humanity strives to preserve, sustain, and immortalise nearly every facet of its existence. We have an obsession with maintaining youth, digitising memories, and conserving history and knowledge; there is the hope that, even after our deaths, there will be some remnant or evidence of our existence, an object that future generations can hold that will resuscitate our since departed souls. Some things should die, however, and it is perverse to refuse them a peaceful sleep.

This thought came to me in a rather bleak discussion with my friend over our funeral preferences. I thought it horrifying that my body might remain intact, marked by a stone and plot upon which descendants and strangers alike might trod, poke, and toy with my memory and what of my spirit remained connected to my body. Living things were not meant to become artefacts; this is why things like taxidermy and mummification disturb us. To die does not just mean to cease living, but to become one with the earth that birthed you — dust — and to surrender to the entropy — physical and metaphysical — that defines existence; to violate this is to defy nature.

Entropy does not necessitate destruction but merely change. Preservation is a noble effort, and to fight against the tide of decay remains humanity’s eternal affliction. Culture, knowledge, relics, and traditions are defined by their geneses, the characteristics imbued upon them at their creation. To edit, develop, or reconstruct any of these would be to lose the object itself; the Parthenon frieze would cease to convey Athenian history, express Hellenistic values, or exhibit Ancient Greek artistic integrity if it were redone in a modernist style or allowed to erode. This is obvious, and I do not condone revisionist histories. Further, history and tradition are not items that should warrant disregard; their social, utilitarian, and moral purposes, not to mention individual personal significance, are paramount. The same is true of knowledge, and we should fight to keep these things ‘alive’.

‘Living’, by definition, connotes an absence of stasis. Knowledge should be built upon, history made dynamic, and traditions malleable; to remain valuable, our world must evolve and be amended, shaped and moulded to serve new and more relevant purposes. Vatican II, the four-day workweek, and the City Beautiful Movement exemplify this. While an original iteration — Latin mass, 40-hour on-site jobs, or industrial utilitarianism — might be ‘dead’, the item itself survives in a new, metamorphosed, often favourable form. Sentimentality is just conservatism’s pseudonym and must be deposed.

Modern social culture is too empirical and thoughtless; memories need not be captured from all angles in 4K with stabilised video, Grandma’s recipes not scanned, digitised, and uploaded to the cloud, nor every thought jotted down in a ‘notes’ app, never to be reopened. We have become lazy, our attention to genuine experience and real memory lethargied by the false assurance that our lives live eternally on some digital record, ever-available to be ‘relived’. Exactitude is not a virtue, but a sedation of our subjective faculties, our human qualities. The memories of your wedding day should shift as your marriage evolves; your grandmother’s handwritten banana bread recipe should stain, tear, and dissolve before it’s committed to memory and jumbled as it’s passed orally to the next generation; maybe your child’s first words were ‘papa’ instead of ‘ball’.

A building abandoned, tradition discontinued, piece of knowledge debunked, or memory forgotten are, perhaps, just signs that they have overstayed their welcome and ought to be laid to rest.

Image from Wikimedia Commons