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We watched the last two episodes of Battlestar Galactica last night, and I don’t think it’s ruining anything in the show to note that, at one point, Kara Thrace said that she didn’t fear death — just the possibility of being forgotten.
No momentous statement, really, but it got me thinking, particularly as I now regularly rage against my own sense of obsolescence: how stupid is the drive to be remembered? And how universal?
It seems to me that an incredible amount of bad writing, at least, has been perpetrated in the name of being remembered. Biographies that read like tabloid interviews; ambitious fiction that fell on the author’s rather embarrassing ignorance of his own lack of depth… Let’s not even mention politics, where megalomaniacs go to fit in and accept donations. If we’re all so desperate to be remembered, why is it so easy to produce something that’s so eminently forgettable?
That question, I think, is the paralyzing fear that keeps me from writing — I mean really writing; writing stories of idiotic devotion, obsessive wrong-headedness, and the thin little sliver of difference between enlightenment and incredible destruction. I think all day about these abstract ideas that seem to capture my nature (for good or ill), but develop mental palsy at the prospect of actually sitting down to make a plot out of them. Is it more terrifying to be forgotten and inconsequential? Or to be remembered for being an idiot?
Would the ideas that obsess me resonate with any other thinking person? Could I build believable situations and characters to carry them forward? Or would any potential result of my writing reference Macbeth in the worst kind of way, being full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing? Shit, even Shakespeare’s a critic.
It bears noting, I think that my favorite writer wrote a book that I revere; I’ve read it many times, and the same cheap paperback copy sits on my shelf, dog-eared, annotated, and ready for another round. At the time of its release, the public hated it, no doubt bored to tears by the chapter on the proper categorization of whales, and the author ended up a mid-level customs house employee until his retirement and relatively obscure death. Based on that story, I have no idea whether one should hope to be like Herman Melville or not.
