All our names are written in water
On the gravestone of the poet John Keats, it is inscribed “Here lies one whose name is writ in water.” Keats himself asked for this epitath when he was on his deathbed. It was a moment of bitterness, a moment of regret that the legacy he left behind would not come close to what he had wished to produce. It was a reflection on the transience of human existence, that we are all doomed to fade away, on a cosmic scale, in as little time as it takes traces of water to evaporate – and with as little to show for ourselves as what remains when water has dried.
But we are not so impermanent as that, and nor was Keats. There is heavy irony here, considering he is one of the most famous poets in England, and schoolchildren still read him in their classes one hundred years later. He did leave behind a legacy, and so does humanity – in the buildings we construct, in the encampments on Mount Everest and the laboratories in Antarctica, in the footprints on the moon, in the thousand-year-old monuments that still stand to this day.
We do have a legacy that remains, and we do have one-way communication with the future. We are not confined completely to our own time.
We are even able to write in water.
Earlier this year, German physicists designed and built a pen capable of writing in water. It releases microscopic ink into the water, and the design of the pen changes the pH of the surrounding ions in the water to make the ink more visible. What is drawn or written remains visible for several minutes before fading away.
(The letters that this technique allows you to make can only be viewed under a microscope, however.)
But that aspect too makes it a perfect metaphor for humankind. Most of us leave a few things behind when we die – our possessions, the small impact our careers have had, a memory in the hearts of those who loved us. But there are billions of us, and we are not all John Keats. We will not all be remembered by generations of schoolchildren, but we will be remembered on a local level. We will be remembered by those who mattered to us. We all have a legacy, microscopic as it may be.
Even water has its legacy. In great enough quantities, it carves caves and smooths rocks. Endless, anonymous molecules of water form canyons, in the same way that vast numbers of humans working together can build monuments that last for thousands of years. A single water droplet may form the tip of a stalactite, as a single passerby may leave a piece of graffiti to be appreciated by museumgoers centuries later. Large or small, we all contribute to the world.
Our presence, or our absence, really is written in water.