Once upon a time capsule
By Ellie Hardy
In 2017 primary school councillors commemorated a local hotels’ reopening by burying a time capsule containing what they called their legacy: letters, photographs, and pieces of work. I wrote a diary entry. “The future” was meant to obey the instructions on the plaque and retrieve it in a farcical archaeological excavation in exactly a century. This came with the bold assumption that they would have the patience. Then again it’s even bolder of me to assume that this would be a priority. That the advanced alien species so far removed from modern humanity would be suffering such a critical deprivation of information on this specific time in history that they would be watching the ticking of the clock for the century to pass so that they can access the legacy we left for them. Or rather the one that we left for ourselves.
Perhaps legacy is more the continuing evidence of our unique existences than it is a final relic embedded in history
The deliberate cultivation of a legacy (while compromising the integrity of the concept of an accurate legacy – though accuracy is not necessarily an essential component in a legacy) also prompts the question: is it for the person making it, or for the person consuming it? For the act of remembering what we have experienced, or for the act of leaving something to be remembered? Perhaps legacy is more the continuing evidence of our unique existences than it is a final relic embedded in history. From Instagram accounts, to pin boards, to autobiographies, to diaries, to requests for the engraving on our gravestones, we collect photographs, memorabilia, souvenirs, quotes, even try to capture our memories – constantly defining and refining how we summarise ourselves. The time capsule can be added to this extensive and ever-increasing list of forms that provide us with the opportunity to cultivate two things: our present legacy, and the future legacy that we leave behind. But I was much more concerned with the legacy I had formed for myself at that time, than the legacy intended for others that was about to be put off for a century. With the legacy I could control, than the legacy that would create itself.
The local hotel’s general manager, however, asserted that we had ‘done something for […] the people of the future’. What exactly we had done for them I do not know, and it may be that the consequences of this action are something we cannot ever know (besides increasing the business of a certain local hotel, and creating an exhibit on the glorification of littering) – but what it did for us is something that we do know. We left behind ‘our own piece of history’. Maybe that is the most important function of a legacy: to feel seen, to be heard, to leave our mark. We long to exist in an expansive universe outside of the border of our own body – born in a particular location, in particular circumstances, at a particular time. We seek symbolic immortality to satisfy our cosmic yearning, by keeping score of our human condition with modern technology.
What exactly we had done for them I do not know, and it may be that the consequences of this action are something we cannot ever know
Despite the existential undercurrents, there was a more obvious educational purpose – to consider how our present lies between the past and the future – to consider our generational legacy. Perhaps the trivial paraphernalia we left behind: including football cards, a fidget spinner, and a sticky man, displays our childish misunderstanding of the task’s significance, or perhaps it reveals an undeniably human quotidian appreciation. That was the generational legacy we chose (I hesitate to use the word “chose” here – while we may be able to choose what we leave, we must acknowledge that we cannot choose what happens when it is found).
So what was my legacy? That is a question I am both exclusively uncertified and uniquely qualified to answer… And yet in this case it was the diary entry I had written. My words. Like all of the other pieces of legacy that we constantly create – we tend to use the written, the graphic, the visual. I for one will always be an advocate of this form. But this allows us to transform the intangible and abstract experience of existing into tangible and physical evidence of this existence, the existential into the performative, and then we call it our legacy. We slap it on paper, dig a hole, bury a box, wait for it to be dug up, and hope it will be remembered. And so becomes the “it”, excluding the us. We lose the person whose legacy it is, and we lose the legacy. So what if instead of concentrating on changing what legacy we leave, we changed what legacy means? Rooting it in the creation, and being less concerned by the consumption, remembering, rather than manufacturing something to be remembered by, and just existing, without the burden of our looming “legacy”.
Image credit: Nolabob via Wikimedia Commons
