Whether you can take anything with you beyond the grave — and whether memories outweigh material possessions — is the first question. For the person of faith, does it matter if anything material is lost? When Christ said one should give one’s possessions to the poor, did he only mean things of material value? What about keepsakes that no one else wants and that have meaning only to you, such as old photographs? I guess the poor could burn them in a garbage can to stay warm — or maybe other eyes than yours would delight in them, because it is hard to know the significance that anything has for another person, which is why we have flea markets.
Every keepsake is a treasure because it represents an act of love, of creation, or it symbolizes a person or action that is fondly remembered. You may keep a symbol of accomplishment, for instance a judge’s gavel, or a diploma. It also may be beautiful in its own right — an amethyst crystal, let’s say, or work of art. Then there are things of monetary value, desirable in a materialistic culture because they are convertible into currency.
Clutter falls into the category of items one collected way back when, which are now not so important. I submit for your approval my departed friend Tom Soter’s complete collection of TV Guides from 1964 through 1970. Or his complete DVD set of The Avengers, The Prisoner, Secret Agent, and the James Bond films. Can these items be properly called keepsakes, since they have little individuality, but were mass produced for a wide market? They are symbols of the way we think, what we identify with, where we put meaning.
I used to joke with Tom, before his death, that I would digitize his entire DVD, audio, and printed books collection — which also includes hundreds of his own original essays and articles — then download those electronic files onto a compact external hard drive, and place that into the jacket pocket of the suit he would be buried in. Now Tom — the organizer and assembler of the collection — is dead, but his collection still exists, not as valuable to anyone now as it once was to him.
Moving my other old friend, Chris Doherty, out of his family home to a much smaller place meant we had to leave a lot of keepsakes behind — mainly books. But now those things are mainly forgotten, and Chris is acquiring new stuff.
The question of what will endure carries lasting fascination. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt are universally recognized for embodying the ancient dream of enduring the ravages of time in their gilt sarcophagi. In a similar way, we acknowledge the great longevity, if not immortality, of great art. One believes that the ‘immortal’ words of Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer will endure for as long as there are people who can read or listen.
And what of those lesser creations of ours, that don’t deserve to be carried into interstellar space by the Voyager probe (which carries a representation of the music of JS Bach)? They will endure here by our own efforts — if we have the willingness and means to secure their material future. Wealthy people have endowed museums of stuff that few care about — such as university collections of writers or musicians who have faded into obscurity. I have heard about warehouses in the Netherlands which house paintings created and funded at government expense — that no one wants.
Charles Foster Kane muttered the name of Rosebud, a treasured childhood keepsake, on his deathbed — a keepsake that mattered to no one but him.
Wouldn’t it be nice to know that nothing is ever lost? This idea is longstanding in religion and philosophy. God sees all, validates all, preserves all.
In modern physics, the “many worlds” theory — seriously considered by scientists — says that any decision made creates a new universe, splitting off from the one in which the decision was not made. Both universes continue their existences into the future, joining multitudes of others, forming continuously. In this concept, even something that could have happened, but didn’t in our universe, exists.
Nothing is ever lost on the blockchain, another attempt to create an immortal record. Transactions written to the blockchain will last forever and always can be subject to scrutiny, as long as there are computers. The blockchain is a digital version of the Akashic record, which purportedly is an eternal record of everything that happens.
In H. G. Wells’ great novel, “The Time Machine,” all learning is lost in the far off world of the future, when our descendants, devolving into frail men and women with simple minds, no longer remember the proud accomplishments of the civilizations which went before. A sense of loss pervades the book, because knowledge has no greater power to endure than the material things which it once created. What does endure are the human values of kindness and generosity. The now withered bunch of flowers with which the Time Traveler returns to the present shows the emotions felt by a young woman of the far future who gave them as a gift. But the flowers, in themselves, mean nothing without the memories retained by the Time Traveler. This echoes the famous letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians, where the Evangelist writes: “These three things endure: faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love.”
If Man was created in God’s image — and if that means that we, like God, are creators — then we have authority over our creations and we can decide what to keep, what to value, and what to lose, even though nothing may ultimately be lost. These creations of ours are not just material things. A problem solving technique, for instance or love poured into a relationship that strengthens and molds it, are other examples. If we channel knowledge into a book, and that book is lost, are the recognitions and procedures we put down in words also lost, or do they go into a cosmic reservoir where they remain latent until the next time they are discovered or invoked?
If we believe nothing is ever lost, it makes it much easier to give up possessions and even to make peace with forgetting.