Take Shelter

December, 2022. A short piece reflecting on the anonymous nature of humanity's vast history.

The bombast of the mind creates in its wake an ocean of forgetfulness.

Every time something is remembered, it is forgotten a hundred fold. The great annals of human experience, weighed against what we have recorded and can transmute from the past, is an ocean to a drop, a shore to a grain of sand, a surging, bubbling mantle to a thin and cold outer crust.

Do not cry for me the thousands that died on the beaches of Normandy, or the millions gassed in extermination chambers, but the countless many slaves that lived and died in toil across the vast continuum of human history, the unrecountable multitudes of invisible families broken apart, youths wrenched from the womb, cultures snuffed out in vast rampages both bloody and bloodless, whole species sent wordlessly to an early grave, innumerable atrocities and dramas that were anything but silent except across the inconceivable breadth of time’s fickle memory.

What we cannot have heard, felt, or seen, we cannot remember. It is only to the mask of memory that recognizes a face, it is only by the smell that we remember what we have already lost.

Take shelter. Our bodies are debris slowly swirling into the black hole of the forgotten. Our minds record nothing but the random flotsam of infinity, and for then, only a second no longer. Our lives have vastly more in common with a history that isn’t remembered.

Our spirit is a tide in the ocean, nothing more.