the pyramids are a monument that I have made,
shape angry wind or hungry rain
cannot be broken down, or innumerable sections
of years that went on for hundreds of years.
I will not die completely;
the other part of me will deceive the goddess of death.
So wrote, without reason, in 23 BCE the proud and self-centered Horace. So far, he has been absolutely right – ancient monuments crumble, or disappear altogether, while his poems remain. However, you may ask – for how long? Latin is already dead, at least as a spoken language, while its experts are dwindling. Pessimists might argue against Horace’s optimism with Thomas à Kempis’ speech from 1418: O quam cito transit gloria mundihow quickly the glory of the world passes away. In fact, more and more people, especially young people, are less interested in written words, especially in the form of long texts such as novels and newspaper editorials, choosing short messages and slogans that are easy to understand and better. not more than half a page long.
How can we warn future generations of the deadly dangers buried underground? Thousands of years from now, our descendants will likely not be able to understand any of the writing systems currently in use. And now how can we adequately predict what future upheavals will occur? Nuclear waste is drilled deep into ancient rock, but can it really be guaranteed that fissures will not occur, that atomic waste will not enter the groundwater? When you consider how little was expected of the effects of climate change a few years ago, it makes you wonder about the safe future of our planet and the obvious damage we are doing to it.
In 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was opened on the Norwegian island of Spitzbergen. It is intended to be a safe depository for the world’s plant diversity. More than 100 meters underground, in an abandoned coal mine tunnel, i The Seed Vault it currently preserves 1,280,677, representing more than 13,000 years of agricultural history. With the introduction of this unique seed bank it was said that the deep frozen plant will be protected from any temperature changes and water damage, resting as it was under the Arctic permafrost. However, already in 2016, an unusually large amount of water entered The Vault’s access tunnel, 100 meters underground. The flow of water was stopped just before it reached the precious plant, although this incident showed that the frozen permafrost is no longer a guarantee of protecting the plant. The Vault – Arctic temperatures are now rising four times faster than the rest of the world causing permafrost to melt at an unprecedented rate. Development of The Vault have been made to prevent water ingress, the tunnel walls have been made “watertight” and above ground, drainage channels now surround the entrance. The Vault.
Full of pride, hope and expectation Horace wrote that his poems would live on for thousands of years. However, he could not have predicted how humans are now destroying the environment we live in together. Writers have been warning us about what is happening right now for over a century. First were science fiction writers who produced terrifying dystopias about what would happen to our planet if we continued to abuse its natural resources, destroy its living organisms, and destroy its life preservers. This writing practice is still alive, especially after the 1945 nuclear bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Tjernobyl. One disturbing and well-documented example of such dystopias is a novel by Russian author Tatyana Tolstaya. The Slynx since the year 2000.
After some kind of nuclear disaster, disabled people survive in what used to be Moscow. They depend on rats for food and clothing, and they know nothing about the past. Most of them are illiterate, although a few people who live in this incredible hardship remember what life was like before The explosionbefore civilization destroys and degrades culture with it. These people occasionally quote poetry and dream of bringing about cultural revival, although the reader understands that they are a dying breed and there is almost nothing left to revive it. The books still exist, but anyone found with one of them is hunted down and severely punished, while their books are confiscated, all in the name of stopping “free thinking.”
Gosh’s novel takes us back to Spitzbergen. Next to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault it’s another abandoned coal mine, much deeper than the one where the Seed Vault resides. At a depth of 300 meters, we find vaults of Arctic World Archive (AWA), where governments, organizations and private individuals are accepted, for a fee, to preserve what they consider to be of world value. Deep down below, under the permafrost (so far) we find copies and thin film of various materials that the AWA guarantees will protect itself for at least 2000 years. Here the Vatican has sent copies and small films of its vast collection of immeasurable manuscripts, a so-called organization. Try Aeterna preserving recordings of 500 languages on the brink of extinction, the Polish Government has kept copies of Chopin’s books and manuscripts. Here we find a wide collection of movies and rock music, as well as architecture-, industrial, and automobile designs from the world’s biggest firms, etc., etc.
Speculators who are considered and invested by AWA are treated with advertising materials and movies that remind about threats to cultural heritage, such as war and terrorism and pictures showing the destruction of the great Buddha in Bamiyan and how ISIS destroyed the precious cultural heritage in Palmyra and Mosul. Other disasters are highlighted, not least those caused by climate change, which if nothing is done to prevent it, will be around the year 2050 to put most of Florida, Bangladesh and the Maldives under water and completely flood and destroy Venice.
Spitzbergen is not the only place with cultural heritage deposits. In the salt mines of Hallstatt in Austria called Human Memory stores, inside specially designed, “unbreakable” ceramic containers, large quantities of small film and copies of important art and manuscripts. Libraries and archives around the world also hide underground labyrinths, filled with books, magazines, and documents.
However, the question remains – how long will these big funds be able to withstand the big changes that threaten our Earth, and will future generations, if they now survive what threatens us all, be able to find these remains of human efforts, be interested in them, or be able to even understand them? Will our descendants be able to benefit from all that may have been preserved in these hidden places – or will they love the sad creatures of Tolstoya’s oppressive wilderness and perhaps despise it all, or regard these things as dangerous? At least let’s appreciate the written heritage left to us by poets like Horace and teach our children to appreciate what our forefathers left behind, learn from and appreciate, and enjoy what is written today.
Primary sources: Gosh, Amitav (2016) The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. University of Chicago Press. Gosh, Amitav (2019) Gun Island. London: John Murray. Horatius Flaccus, Quintus (1967) The Odes of Horace Translated by James Michie. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics. Stagliano, Ricardo (2024) “A reminder of the future”, Il Venerdi di Repubblica, 25 October. Tolstaya, Tatyana (2016) The Slynx. New York Review of Books.
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© Inter Press Service (2024) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service
