'The memory of every memory, the life of every life'

I've been reflecting on the theme of loss - our human discomfort with it and our desire to preserve for posterity that which may become lost. Here are some examples that sprang to mind:

• When C S Lewis died, his brother Warnie put large numbers of his papers on a bonfire. It was only the arrival of Walter Hooper that rescued works like Lewis’ unfinished novel, The Dark Tower, and his translation of the Aeneid from the flames.
• When urbanisation and industrialisation led to the loss of many of the country’s folk songs, collectors such as Cecil Sharpe and Revd Sabine Baring-Gould toured widely, recording as many as they could. (You may like to read this poem about Revd Sabine Baring-Gould collecting folk songs.)
• When languages are on the point of becoming extinct, charities such as the Society for Endangered Languages tries to record native speakers and document their speech and work out their grammar.
• The composer Gerald Finzi spent much of his life seeking out and preserving species of apple that might otherwise have been lost.
• The Museum of the Holocaust in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, tries to find out as much as it can about those killed by the Nazis.
• Y Gododdin is a medieval Welsh poem that records the names of all those from the Brittonic kingdom of Gododdin who died fighting the Angles in a battle near Catraeth around 600 AD.
• Last summer, I met a 95-year-old botanist who is trying to record all the flora of the Teesdale valley before it disappears as a result of undergrazing.
• The Biorescue Project is using surrogate pregnancy to try and save the Northern White Rhino, of which there are only two individuals left in the world.
• When Cromwell’s troops smashed the stained glass window at the west end of Winchester Cathedral, someone swept up all the broken pieces and stored them until the Restoration, and they were put back in place – albeit in a completely haphazard manner.

Human beings are not content with things being lost. There is a deep instinct within us that wants to ‘gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost’.

The question is, is this an inspiringly defiant but ultimately futile gesture – like Canute trying to stop the inevitable tide? Or is it a pointer to some way in which all things that created are kept and held and preserved – ready to be recreated at the Restoration of All Things?

In the Canute camp is Elizabeth Finch, the eponymous heroine of Julian Barnes’ novel:

And then there is the inevitable third stylisation – of posthumous memory. Leading to the moment when the last living person to remember you has their very last thought about you. There ought to be a name for that final event, which marks your final extinction. (Elizabeth Finch, Vintage, Penguin, p. 58.)

In the pointer camp is Thomas Traherne, who wrote: ‘All transeunt things are permanent in God’ (Centuries 1:62).

And the Welsh poet and Christian pacifist, Waldo Williams:

So who was it stood

there in the middle of this shameless glory, who

stood holding it all? Of every witness witness,

the memory of every memory, the life

of every life? 

That is who we serve. And gravestones, marriage registers, service registers, lists of former rectors on the walls of churches, family trees are all of them instances of the human instinct to record, to preserve, to gather - and pointers to that permanent Witness, that unfading Memory, that eternal Life.