What do we have in this scene? Generic teenagers, each wearing two strips of cloth and lying on a larger, thicker cloth, piles of white, clotted snow, parallel steel rails, idling diesels and a mile of open freight car doors, a hobo in every one. Do we need to examine the piles of snow to see what crystal remnants there are of the flakes? Do we need to know the writing on the side of the Grand Trunk or Soo Line or Chesapeake diesel--the numbers, the letters, the grafitti? The name of the engineer or the names of the women? Where the hoboes are bound or where they're from?
The quantity of information in that one brief memory from long ago approaches infinity. How would you store that? The smell of the melting snow and the suddenly vibrant grass, the stink of diesel smoke and the girls' perfume. The heat of the sunlight. The clouds--one in the northwest sky shaped like a vodka gimlet, one directly overhead shaped like an amoeba or an 18th century Chinese man's conception of a cowboy, which he has never seen.
I believe it was Kurt Vonnegut who imagined a history of the world written far in the future which contained the following information about our time--the only information anyone could be sure of at that late date and time--"After the birth and death of the son of the Creator of the Universe, there was a period of change."
I think the larger question is how to determine what to save, and when it comes to media, how much effort should be made to retain it. Some kind of monetary value might be established for a sonnet or a novel--and when that is spent, the thing must be allowed to wither and die (i.e. not be brought forward to new media formats) in the hope that it will return again with the spring like the heather, the girls in bikinis, and the melting snow.
By this point in my reverie, I realized that the progress bar on my archive program had been frozen for quite a while. Clearly, my database hit some kind of iceberg in the middle of my attempt to archive it. I pulled the DVD-RAM from the drive and folded it into quarters, folding it back and forth in my hands until it fractured, raining irridescent flakes of the metalic recording layer on my floor. I put the pieces aside to go to the big shredding bin later. I gave up and went home to have dinner with my family, blessing in my heart the archivists and their efforts.
Some day maybe I will write again, about the discarded books I collected once from the city library.
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