Memento Vitae

The days pass with a bewildering acceleration lately. They say that time flies when you’re having fun. I know that it does, but the last thing I would call what’s happening in my life right now is “fun.” Is it anticipation? 

Like everyone, I collect things. I used to collect books and vinyl records, but I lost all of them when my sister died five years ago in Anchorage. I was too far away, and too broke, to try and save any of them from the yard sale that my sister’s friends organized after her death. But they had to clear everything out of her apartment in a few days and needed money to pay for her funeral and cremation. Her ashes were scattered at a beautiful spot in Cook Inlet. 

Now I have to travel light, so I collect digital objects – pictures, documents, books, music, movies. I have an email account with an inbox that grows every day. I open every piece of mail and often notice links to articles that I mean to get back to, but I almost never do. And I ask myself what will happen to all of these things that I collect when I am gone. My sister was one of those people who put post it notes everywhere – on her makeup mirror, next to her computer screen, on her refrigerator, cupboards – wherever she was likely to look so that she would be reminded to do something, or see something, or simply to be brave or hopeful or patient enough to get her through another day. She was waiting for me to come home when she died. I didn’t make it. And it hurts every time I think of it. 

Mirroring my thoughts about what survives of a lifetime of collecting mementos was the hauntingly beautiful second part, titled “Time Passes,” of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse. In Part I we are in the company of the Ramsey family in their house on the Hebridean island of Skye. It is September. The house is crowded with guests and the eight children of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey. Mrs. Ramsey is apparently happy to have so many loved persons around her, but there is a moment when she stops and seems to pivot on a point of transition, of which she is fully aware: 

It was necessary now to carry everything a step further. With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta’s arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past. 

In Part II of the novel, ten years have passed and the house is shut and forsaken. The family has been altered irrevocably – Mrs. Ramsey has died, and Andrew, one of her sons, was killed in the war (the Great War), and Prue, one of her daughters, died “in some illness connected with childbirth.” A Mrs. McNab comes occasionally to clean and keep the house from falling to utter ruin. Woolf goes into exquisite detail describing the physical condition of the house that has had no occupants for so many years: 

So with the house empty and the doors locked and the mattresses rolled round, those stray airs, advance guards of great armies, blustered in, brushed bare boards, nibbled and fanned, met nothing in bedroom or drawing-room that wholly resisted them but only hangings that flapped, wood that creaked, the bare legs of tables, saucepans and china already furred, tarnished, cracked. What people had shed and left – a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes – those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again. 

Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its clear image on the wall opposite. Only the shadows of the trees, flourishing in the wind, made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment darkened the pool in which light reflected itself; or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor. So loveliness reigned and stillness, and together made the shape of loveliness itself, a form from which life had parted; solitary like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quickly that the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though once seen. Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions – ‘Will you fade? Will you perish?’ – scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should answer: we remain. 

Nothing it seemed could break that image, corrupt that innocence, or disturb the swaying mantle of silence which, week after week, in the empty room, wove into itself the falling cries of birds, ships hooting, the drone and hum of the fields, a dog’s bark, a man’s shout, and folded them round the house in silence. Once only a board sprang on the landing; once in the middle of the night with a roar, with a rupture, as after centuries of quiescence, a rock rends itself from the mountain and hurtles crashing into the valley, one fold of the shawl loosened and swung to and fro. Then again peace descended; and the shadow wavered; light bent to its own image in adoration on the bedroom wall; when Mrs. McNab, tearing the veil of silence with hands that had stood in the wash-tub, grinding it with boots that had crunched the shingle, came as directed to open all windows, and dust the bedrooms.* 

Virginia Woolf was perhaps predisposed by temperament to imagining such a deserted world. She makes the abandoned house in her novel seem like it’s returning to nature, absorbing the natural world outside its walls. And it isn’t at all an unhappy process. Early in the novel, Lily Briscoe and William Bankes are standing in the garden overlooking the strand: 

… both of them looked at the dunes far away, and instead of merriment felt come over them some sadness – because the thing was completed partly, and partly because distant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest. 

Five years ago I published “The Deserted City” in response to the death of my sister. I was inspired to write about a Hollywood film from 1959 called The World, the Flesh and the Devil in which a man, played by Harry Belafonte, is trapped by a mine cave-in and discovers upon emerging above ground that every other human being has mysteriously vanished. Searching for signs of life, he drives all the way to New York City, only to find it, too, is emptied of people. I wrote: 

Imagine that you are living in a modern, bustling city with a population in the hundreds of thousands and you wake up one morning to discover that everyone in the city has mysteriously vanished, as if, while you were sound asleep, every single resident of the city had been vacated or evacuated for reasons that are unknown to you. 

Just before he died of tuberculosis in January 1950, George Orwell confided in a letter to a friend that he was having recurring dreams of finding himself alone in a deserted city. Fearless to the end, and without knowing that his own death was imminent, Orwell self-diagnosed the dream as a fear of death. 

I don’t dream of deserted cities, but the idea of a world bereft of people is becoming somewhat timely now that it’s impossible to deny climate change. The prospect of our extinction is being foreshadowed by the extinction of other species; insects are in decline, along with birds. Should the world outlast us, with no one around to even observe it, the Ramsey house, modeled on Virginia Woolf’s family house in Cornwall, whispers to us its consent – a world fallen silent but for the sea winds rushing to shape it and the doors and shutters creaking as they are set in motion. 

*To the Lighthouse, Part II, chapter 4.