A birthday is another milestone on the road to oblivion. At an age where reality bleeds into dream and dream into reality, the anniversary of one’s birth can be less a time of celebration and more a time of summing up.
The memories, the hauntings, will linger for a short time among small circles of family and friends. But there must be records, documentation, artifacts to fix a life lived in history where, even modest, it can be rediscovered and re-appreciated by a wider circle.
And who’s collecting those records now? Who’s keeping the documentation, guarding the artifacts?
I have a framed map on my wall of “The Country Twelve Miles Round London,” published in 1823.
What makes it precious to me is that it identifies, by name, many who lived there then. There is the Duke of Clarence, the third son of George III who acceded as William IV seven years after the map was published.
There is the first Viscount Sidmouth, home secretary in 1823 and later to become prime minister.
There is Sir Augustus Frazer who had commanded the royal horse artillery in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo.
There, too, is Lady Buckingham, running her own household, although it would take an act of parliament in 1850 to divorce her from the duke.
There is Horner, Esq., near Peckam Rye, whose identity has probably never been worth fixing. And there were those to become famous around London whose lodgings are not identified.
The year before 1823, an 11-year-old boy, Charles Dickens, had moved from Chatham to join his family in Camden Town, near Regent’s Park. It was the London that Dickens would try to keep alive in his novels while it changed so quickly around him.
But on the map can be traced the long walks he used to make as an adult, from Highgate, skirting Caen Wood, to Hampstead Heath and on to North End, the same route followed by Bill Sikes, haunted by the gore of his Nancy, until he turned, fatally, back to London.
Old objects, too, have a history that longs to speak but is dumb. One can try to coax it from antique furniture by touching it as previous unknown owners would have done, to feel its weight in old silver.
I used to take snuff — before I was warned my nose would rot off my face — from a small Scottish ram’s horn with a silver shield bearing the initials J.B. and the date 1763. That was the year Samuel Johnson embraced his new friend James Boswell as Boswell left for a Grand Tour of Europe.
Is it beyond possibility that Johnson gave him the ram’s horn as a going-away gift, or that the young Scot gave it to Johnson whose life he would immortalize?
When there are no records, imagination has to suffice. And for future under-recorded generations, those who feel the pull of history will have to rely more heavily on imagination — or they will ignore the pull and become more solitary, poor and shortsighted. And probably more nasty for it.
Our national government is less interested in collecting statistics about those whom it governs than it is about tracking voting intentions. Many artifacts that reveal so much about the people who used them are traded on markets for the highest prices they bring.
There may be records of births and deaths, but not much of what happens in between. Files are destroyed, records are erased under the assumption that after a certain period of time they are no longer “useful” and must make way for more contemporary ones, which will have an even shorter shelf life.
An absurd fixation on personal privacy, coupled with sophisticated commercial snooping, means that where people live, what they do and what they believe matters less than how and where they shop. Electronic clues to a life as it is lived can be tossed aside with the flick of a fingernail on a screen. Ours is an Etch A Sketch existence.
And when I’m gone, my works won’t have been collected. Hunter, Esq., will be on no map.
