Cave walls are coated with handprints, crudely marking a record of each body that once walked before them. Desks are scratched with declarations in old ink — so-and-so was here on this date. Remember it, please. Portraits are painted and hung in galleries, names known and names forgotten, but likenesses immortalised for generations to come.
Why?
Because all we want is to be remembered.
To know that our lives have not passed by in a vacuum — untouched, unknown and unworthy of note.
Every act, every monument, every record, purposes for a unified aim — to prove our once being and to memorialise what once was.
Yet, the earth is ridden with tombstones with epitaphs that have eroded away, the bones that lie beneath the soil now unknown. Ashes of those once dearly loved are scattered in the wind. Eventually, the average child can only recite the names of their grandparents and great-grandparents — those before disappear into the annals of lost memories.
We wish to be remembered, but there is no guarantee that we will be.
Is all we do therefore for nothing? When we say we want to have mattered — for our existences to have meant something — are we doomed to have expressed a futile hope? What makes our lives significant?
The English Romantic poet John Keats penned the sonnet, “When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be,” three years preceding his death. An acute anxiety pervades each line: what if death is to strike the speaker before their “pen has gleaned [their] teeming brain”; their consciousness left unpreserved by their poetry? What if they never manage to experience the profundity of the human experience, the “shadows” of “high clouds of romance” forever untraced? What if they fail to provide any notable output for mankind to recognise their existence? After all, only the words of the exceptional continue to reverberate after their death.
What if the speaker ceases to be before they are?
Their fear eventually subsumes them: Keats’ speaker stands alone on the seashore, gazing upon an endless horizon that extends into a bleak, solitary nothingness. Love and fame, they muse, are no longer significant. The assured arrival of death has enervated them. They do not matter. Nothing does.
Yet, Keats’ approach for remembrance is flawed. We do not need to be exceptional to be noteworthy. We need only to be good.
Great deeds form biographies and resumes — they do not memorialise the people behind them. Our character, and the virtues by which we live, do. Consider the people you love or cherish in your own life. Why do you adore them? What draws you to them? Perhaps it is their intelligence, their compassion or their kindness. We are hardly ever impelled to say it is their life as noted on paper — a series of grand accomplishments that tell us little about their true selves.
We wish to matter. We look to one another for that recognition and acknowledgement. Yet, believing that our consciousness must be archived or stored in some form — poetry, painting, monument, record, biography and such — is a fallacy. Our legacies are relational.
We want to be remembered. But, maybe, to be felt and known is enough.