Back in July I mentioned an intent to make digital versions
of my family/personal photo albums. I didn’t want to create just page after
page of disordered scanned images but coherent albums with chronology and
commentary that would be comprehensible to a stranger – and that could be
stored on a flash drive. The likelihood is low that any stranger ever will look
at them and try to make sense of them, but I wanted to make it possible. Not
until the beginning of this month did I take a stab at doing this. Despite a
somewhat desultory approach to the task, I’ve made some headway though there is
still far to go. As source material, there exist in my closet four physical real-space
album volumes with
only the loosest internal order: 1) 1890s to 1955, 2) 1956-1969, 3) 1970-2001,
and 4) 2002-present. #4 is the thinnest since it consists mostly of printouts
of digital photos, and I haven’t printed more than a small fraction of those I
have saved. Digitizing the first three albums (I’m keeping the four volume
chronology) requires a lot of scanning but at least the original photos are all in
the same place. Most of the pics from the past 20 years, on the other hand, are
already digital but are scattered here and there on a variety of devices; the
physical album for this period is too incomplete to provide much guidance.
Editing is a must. It’s as important to know what exclude from an album as what
to include: most of our photos are best left out of them and stored (if at all)
loose in a box, be the box literal or virtual.
Perspective is also something to be
considered: e.g. identifying someone in an image as, say, a great grandmother is obviously a
perspective of the album assembler, not (probably) the reader. In the preface
to Volume I of the digital albums, I wrote the following:
“Every photo album, like every narrative, has to be from a
particular perspective if it is to have any coherence rather than being a
random gallimaufry of images. Stories can have multiple narratives, true
enough, but each of those sub-stories still has a single perspective. This
album, assembled by me, is inevitably from my perspective – not only from
narcissism, though I won’t try to deny a quantity of that, but because I cannot
write or post from any other without wandering into fiction. Besides, as the
last one standing in my branch of the family this album is not designed to be
shared at family gatherings where multiple perspectives are expected and
appreciated. That gathering would consist of… well… me. It is possible that
this will be perused at some point by friends or by two-or-more-step-removed
relatives who might share some elements of the history recorded in it. If so,
hi there. Take what you will from it that is relevant to you. As for the rest,
consider it a visit with Richard who is making everything about himself in his
usual fashion.”
The reader may notice a sense of mortality in that preface.
This is an inevitable consequence of looking at a family photo album – at least
after a certain age. All but a few of the people imaged in Volume I are gone
(all the survivors are seniors), well over half of those in Volume II are gone
as well, and a large minority in Volume III.
When I was in high school in the 1960s the breakthroughs in
bioscience were fresh and there was every expectation that a biotech revolution
would happen in the next few decades to match the mechanical and electronic
revolution of the previous half century. “Some of you sitting in this very
classroom,” one biology teacher told us, “will live to be 200.” We’d have
colonies on the moon by 2000, too.
There is a difference between those two predictions. The
technology exists so that we could
have colonies on the moon at this time if we wanted them. They would just be so
insanely expensive to establish and maintain as to make no sense. A 200 year
lifespan, however, is off the table no matter what resources are devoted to it.
Aging is not a singular process but involves a convergence of ever diminishing
resilience along multiple pathways. Researchers publishing in Nature make this point and came up with a maximum theoretical
lifespan if everything in a person’s life in terms of health went absolutely perfectly:
“Formally, such a state of ‘zero-resilience’ at the critical point corresponds
to the absolute zero on the vitality scale in the Strehler–Mildvan theory of
aging, thus representing a natural limit on human lifespan… A recent careful
analysis of human demographic data supports this argument and yields an
estimate for limiting lifespan of 138 years.” It should be noted that no one
ever has lived 138 years as far as we know. The longest life that is reliably
documented (122) is that of Jeanne Louise Calment (1875-1997).
By coincidence my recreational reading material last week was
by John Martin Fischer, a philosopher with The Immortality Project, titled Death, Immortality and Meaning in Life.
It’s an ambitious title for a book only 196 pages long. The book summarizes
philosophical takes on the subject from Epicurus to Becker. The Immortality
Project actually gets its name from the influential 1973 book The Denial of Death for which author Ernest
Becker won a posthumous Pulitzer in 1974. Humans are the only animals aware
they are mortal, and Becker argued that in the process of trying to escape our
mortality we developed civilization, art, family legacies, and religion. (We
also develop neuroses, but that is another issue.) These “immortality projects”
are attempts to ensure that something of ourselves survives. Making a digital
photo album presumably is one such project, too, albeit a modest one.
All such projects are ultimately doomed of course. Nothing is
forever: not civilization and not the planet itself. But a brief existence is
still better than none. Wrote Kurt Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle, “And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and
look around. Lucky me, lucky mud.”
T-Bone Walker - Life Is Too Short
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