When we depart this life, must the stories of our existence fade within the passing of a few years? That has been the fate of billions of mortals who have preceded today’s living.
Since the beginning of human history around 50,000 B.C., 108 billion humans have been born. Just over seven billion are living now, or 6.5 percent of all those ever born are still breathing—a tiny fraction when we consider the meteoric growth of world population today.
How much do we know of the 101 billion humans who have preceded us? The majority are nameless, forgotten as if they never lived, merely dust in the wind.
Except for a relative handful of kings, queens, heroes, political leaders, scientists, artists, writers, intellectuals, athletes, and celebrities who have been held in perpetuity through their works or historical documentation by others, the clear majority of human stories have just perished. We know nothing of those masses who have lived and passed on. Most of us do not know anything about the lives and times of our great-great-great grandparents, if even their names.
The First Immortal
Five thousand years ago, in Mesopotamia, the ancient lands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers now called Iraq, something miraculous happened in the evolution of our species and its ceaseless battle against temporality. Humans discovered how to write.
Death could no longer silence people after departing their mortal bodies. The written word gave our species the power to reach through millennia and speak inside the heads of those living in the distant future.
Then something else happened, another miracle of self-preservation. Enheduanna, daughter of the first emperor in history, was also the first person known to sign her name to a literary creation.
She lived 4300 years ago, and her gift to humanity was the possibility of immortality that can be bestowed by the written word when assigned to a single visionary author. The writing was no longer nameless, codified thought but personal ownership in the future.
Enheduanna’s name means “Lady Ornament of the Sky.” For centuries after her death, the first author continued to set standards for culture, literature, liturgy hymns, poetry, and religion. Her legacy includes an extensive body of creative output, including forty-two poems, psalms, and prayers that have served as a template for poets, priests, and scribes throughout history.
We know that she existed at a certain point in time. We know what she dreamed. We are aware of her fearlessness and prescience. We know she was a great author, composer, poet, and High Priestess of the ancient Moon God Nanna at temples in the Mesopotamian city-states of Ur and Uruk (Iraq).
Enheduanna lives today, four-and-a-third millennia after she exhaled her final breath. She speaks to us through her creations—and when combined into a complete archive, we have her time capsule filled with revelations that we can contemplate at will.
Permanent Acclaim
A generation ago most unexceptional people, removed from the public eye, could not hope to persist beyond death, except perhaps as represented by a deteriorating marker bearing an irrelevant name, lost somewhere in a cemetery or mausoleum. Without notable personal achievements that would become written documents or audio or video recordings, it was not possible for the majority to survive beyond the grave.
With the advent of the digital age and the extraordinary power and memory of the internet, it is now possible for anyone to write and record their thoughts, dreams, and values for others to read, see, and hear—and with archival preservation, for thousands of years from now. Today, for the first time in human history, anybody can paddle beyond the grave, aiming for the distant shores of time.
Questions to contemplate about your “Immortality Narrative”
- Which of your life lessons are most important to share with your children or other young people in your life?
- Have you been inspired by classic children’s book characters, and, if so, which characters had the most impact on your views and values?
- Who would you most like to attend your last lecture and why are these people most important?
- If you were to be diagnosed with a terminal disease, such as pancreatic cancer, how would you prefer to spend your final months of “functional health,” if granted this time for closure? What would be your priorities?
- What tangible memories about you would you like to leave for future generations, and in what form would these memories be encapsulated? A book or other writing? A video? Artwork? A legacy website?
Excerpted from Questions of the Spirit: The Quest for Understanding at a Time of Loss by Brent Green, Copyright 2017. All Rights Reserved.
A beautiful hit song by Kansas, a progressive rock super-group, helps drive home the point of this blog post. Kerry Livgren, the song's writer and guitarist, was my high school classmate. Kerry has recently published his memoir entitled Miracles Out of Somewhere.
To order your copy of Questions of the Spirit, visit the book's Amazon page.
Comments