Time Travel. A History

First came songs, clay pots, drawings on cave walls. Then tablets and scrolls, paintings and books. Knots in alpaca threads, recording Incan calendar data and tax receipts. These are external memory, extensions of our biological selves. Mental prostheses. Then came repositories for the preservation of these items: libraries, monasteries, museums; also theater troupes and orchestras. They may consider their mission to be entertainment or spiritual practice or the celebration of beauty, but meanwhile they transmit our symbolic memory across the generations. We can recognize these institutions of culture as distributed storage and retrieval systems. The machinery is unreliable—disorganized and discontinuous, prone to failures and omissions. They use code. They require deciphering. Then again, whether made of stone, paper, or silicon, the technology of culture has a durability that the biological originals can only dream of. This is how we tell our descendants who we were. By contrast, the recent smattering of time capsules is an oddball sideshow.

The capsulists consider it naïve to rely on such perilous and transient human institutions as museums and libraries—all the more so in our era of chips and clouds. What good will Wikipedia be when the lights go out, or even the Metropolitan Museum of Art? They believe they are taking the long view. Civilizations rise and fall, with an emphasis on fall. From the Bronze Age cultures of the Minoans and the Mycenaeans to the modern civilization in which we live, there was no direct influence—no continuity and no collective memory. These are islands in the ocean of time. So we rely on arrowheads and bones and broken pots found in burial pits. They built their palaces, painted their frescoes, and vanished into obscurity. The darkness drops again. We dig up their remains, but the bits uncovered by archeologists are the accidental bits. In Pompeii it took a cataclysm to freeze vivid tragic tableaus of daily life for our future appreciation. The makers of time capsules prefer not to wait for the sky to pour down ash and pumice.

With the passing millennia, though, humans have developed into something different from the amnesiac creatures who formed those scattered, preliterate settlements. We are well connected information pack rats. Far more mementoes are preserved in museums than in cornerstones. Still more are looked after by coin collectors and random hoarders. The garages of antique automobile collectors are more effective preservers of old cars than buried concrete vaults. Toys? Bottles of old beer? There are specialty museums just for those.

As for knowledge itself, that is our stock in trade. When the Library of Alexandria burned, it was one of a kind. Now there are hundreds of thousands, and they are crammed to overflowing. We have developed a species memory. We leave our marks everywhere. The apocalypse may come—our complacent technocracy foundering amid pandemic or nuclear holocaust or the self-inflicted blighting of the global ecosystem—and when it does, our ruins will be prodigious.

When people fill time capsules they are trying to stop the clock—take stock, freeze the now, arrest the incessant head-over-heels stampede into the future. The past appears fixed, but memory, the fact of it, or the process, is always in motion. That applies to our prosthetic global memory as well as the biological version. When the Library of Congress promises to archive every tweet, does it create a Borgesian paradox in real time or a giant burial chamber in progress?

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“BUT IT IS only in ashes that a story endures,” wrote the Genovese poet Eugenio Montale. “Nothing persists except extinguished things.” When the archeologists of the future come to read our legacy in the proverbial ash heap of history, they will not look to the basement crypt at Oglethorpe University or the time capsule buried in the mud of the former Flushing, Queens. Anyway we will be rewriting that legacy till the bitter end. Stanisław Lem imagined this vividly in his postapocalyptic comic novel Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, published in Poland in 1961. The bathtub serves as yet another time capsule. It is marble, “like a sarcophagus,” in an intricate complex of corridors (designed by Kafka, evidently) deep underground.^*7 It is buried, more or less apocalyptically, and a millennium or so later it is excavated by archeologists of the future. In it they find a pair of human skeletons and a handwritten manuscript: “a voice speaking to us across the abyss of centuries, a voice belonging to one of the last inhabitants of the lost land of Ammer-Ka.”