Long, long ago, in a decade far away - before the 90s - we thought of the internet as changeable, impermanent. If you got something published on the internet, so what? Newspapers and magazines were the thing, and books even more. You get a book published, man, now you've made it. It might be that it was quickly remaindered, or put in the stacks of the library (we did not acknowledge that libraries weeded books then, that was a secret known only to librarians). But it was solid. Someone somewhere would keep copies, and there was always a chance that a hundred years later someone would pick it up, and remember you. Books were in a small way indestructible. My parents would regard a book as being "really" published. But gradually we came to say "the internet is forever," meaning that what you said could be brought back to haunt you and there was no getting away from it. Moving to another town might not help.
When I go back to the posts from earlier years to consider whether I want to repost them, or even just see what I said about a subject, many of the old links no longer go anywhere, not even to a website that still exists. A lot of the pictures are gone, some replaceable, some not. Some I can't even remember what they were myself. The internet is not forever either. Nor are books. Newspapers and magazines are nostalgic curiosities now.
The writings preserved from thousands of years ago are mostly records of trade, or of gifts between kings, or of conquests. Statements to or about gods, curses or good-luck symbols, laws and proclamations. Only later do we get anything like annals or stories. Admittedly, there is internal evidence that those stories and histories stretch back earlier, before writing. Yet we likely remember only one person in a million, one story in a million, one battle in a million. Ozymandias, Ramesses II, just barely got remembered, though he reigned for decades and we still have his mummy. Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History? Lady, no one makes history. Vanity, Vanity, all is Vanity, saith the prophet. I grant that it is even worse for women.
So what is permanent, then? I learned decades ago from CS Lewis something that shocked me at the time (though I immediately saw the truth that had been invisible to me for years, once he had said it) in "The Weight of Glory," that nations, and denominations, and families, and legacies, and DNA, and schools, and even ideas, so beloved of those of us who blog and hope our ideas might one day ascend to some permanency, are not only eventually outlasted, but will eventually be revealed as ephemeral, as mere wisps that we barely recall. It is we who are permanent, and that is not only comforting but frightening, like being in water up past your neck, so that you have to stand on tiptoe to survive.
Or go under the waves and be baptised.
"You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve," said Aslan. "And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content." Aslan, in Prince Caspian
But back to "The Weight of Glory," perhaps the greatest essay of the 20th C.
For you must not think that I am putting forward any heathen fancy of being absorbed into Nature. Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her. When all the suns and nebulae havepassed away, each one of you will still be alive. Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol Scripture invites me to use. We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects. And in there, in beyond Nature, we shall eat of the tree of life...
It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses
