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Time Marches On and Deep Longings for Remembrance |
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written
by daw84 / 10.24.2005 |
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| melancholy of the antique world |
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Part 1: |
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Time marches on, no matter how hard we try to stop it. For this reason, the time machine would be the single most impressive invention our world has ever known. It would give us the ability to control that which, although we’ve fought it for millennia, man has never been able to subdue and overcome. The fight for control is very apparent in today’s culture, as people continually attempt to look younger for longer, investing copious amounts of time into exercise, dress, hair dye, hair implants, picking youthful friends, dieting, all in the hopes of conquering time. However, it is seen even more clearly in the abounding ruins of the ancient world, which tell the story of glorious times long passed. Ruins blatantly convey that those who invested in them were vainly attempting to overcome time’s inevitable effects, and the greatest irony of all lies in the fact that, now that time has conquered their creators, time is conquering the created.
The Forum Romanum in all its ruinous glory exemplifies the battle against time. Roman emperors continually poured time and effort into the temples and monuments therein. Now, thousands of years later, their efforts are only a quiet whisper crying out from piles of rubble which once loudly proclaimed the glory of the Roman Empire. They battled for immortality, to preserve their name and achievements in this world for generations to come. While many were relatively successful, as can be seen in the names engraved into the stone of the surviving ruins, how effective were these powerful men really? They longed for eternal influence on the empire they had striven their whole lives to control, but their efforts today, although aesthetically pleasing and architecturally magnificent, are largely inconsequential. Moreover, their monuments continue to be slowly eroded into oblivion by the elements, erasing their names from the face of Rome forever.
Greater than the sense of melancholy from the monuments which have vanished in the past and continue to degrade today, is the tragedy of the incredible amount of time and effort which was invested to construct such elaborate displays of glory. The Roman Emperors poured their lives into the preservation of their empire and name. They continually conquered, built, consolidated, expanded, and embellished, at the cost of the very lives they were attempting to glorify. And, as the sun set on their lives, they did not lie in their beds hoping to have spent just a little more time designing new ways to carve their name and past glories into the city. They each, in the midst of their own immense insecurities, wondered if what they had done really was worth it, for, in spite of their grandest efforts, they had been, by time itself.
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Part 2: |
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Deep down, people long to live for something greater than themselves. We each desperately fight to be remembered, not because we hope to, in some mysterious way, enjoy what we have constructed post-mortem, but because we want to have true, lasting impact on others now and in the future. Personally, I can think of nothing more horrific than entering the grave knowing my life has been of essentially no consequence. Throughout history, men have fought to gain influence through the acquisition of power. Over and over again, kingdoms were expanded, and again and again they were broken to pieces driving the memory of the powerful deceased into nothingness.
The Roman Forum is a single, massive testimony to the Roman Emperors’ fight for the survival of their name. In an insecure frenzy of activity, they went to their graves building monuments, conquering foreign nations, and embellishing their palaces, driven solely by their dreams of lasting fame and influence. Using long-lasting materials, like gold, travertine, and marble, they constructed enormous monuments in their own honor or to honor the gods, emblazoning their names throughout the space hoping to be remembered for all eternity. The worst possible punishment was the erasure of ones name from all monuments, eliminating their memory for all eternity. So men fought and died to get their names posted in places such as the forum, all in the hope that it would mean the survival and validification of what they had striven their whole lives to achieve, a life of impact that truly counts.
In Pompeii, people were driven into obscurity quickly and unexpectedly. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius left them no time to plan elaborate tombs or preserve their memory in a specific fashion. All they were, all they worked for was utterly frozen in time and buried for generations. Their impact was halted instantaneously as layer upon layer of ash stacked up on their dead bodies in their burned out homes. Their only hope was that, at that precise moment of death, they had been able to achieve what they had wanted to achieve and had been able to invest how they longed to invest. Today, they are not known for their great conquests or incredible feats. Rich and poor, male and female, slave and free, all were frozen forever in the midst of their everyday activities with only the plaster casts of their charred bodies showing each intricate feature of their bodies. Their memory was swallowed alive.
At the pinnacle of the Roman Empire, no one would have guessed it would crumble. The Colosseum, standing in all its grotesque glory would never collapse to be stripped of the glorious coat of marble upon it. Nero’s Golden Palace would never be ground to bits, its embellishments scattered throughout the city. Today, St. Peters stands tall, dominating the Roman scenery. Will it ever topple? Ironically, at the base of a certain pillar, an inscription in the beautiful marble foreshadows the looming future for the building. Plundered from a nearby temple, the small inscription is all that survives of the previous structure. Now, it is incorporated in the massive structure, and one day, the black hole of forgottenness will swallow up St. Peter’s Basilica as it is broken down, spread out, and reused piece by piece.
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