How does a library evoke memento mori?
On Deep Time, the Future Library art project, and memento mori
When I was a child, I spent hours and hours ruminating on the idea of infinity. My favorite question: is there a Book of Everything? Today, I am happy to be here to announce I am on my way to answer this impossible question. Have not found a book like that yet, but I found something that bears just as much wonder!
Deep Time
Deep time is generally geological or cosmic time covering billions of years. Seems impossible to even think about such measures. In physics, time was proven to be relative by Einstein overriding the then-leading view of a Newtonian world of linearities. Being generally fascinated by quantum physics myself, and turning to geography with curiosity, the Arts student in me came to the surface to connect the dots between seemingly different fields about which many would say have no relation.
Time is a social construct, yet there is a kind of ‘time’ overriding the mentally fabricated story of humans. It materializes in ‘the sea, the sky, the Earth, the air’, and the deeper fabric of the Universe, in which humans are only grains of sand. Trying to comprehend deep time and losing yourself in the process can be both awe-inspiring and depressingly daunting. A sublime experience.
“Sublime is what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense.” - Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Judgment (1790)
Whenever I think about deep time, my mind is playing a movie of the inside of the Earth, layers of sand and ground, of water and material changing and forming over time. Sometimes even the “big bang” pops in there revealing itself as a deeply ingrained but long-forgotten memory of my human vessel. We are made of stardust, we will become stardust. Humans are ephemeral like roses and daffodils, we bloom and fade. We are fallible and incapable of grasping this kind of scale of time. ‘Deep’ as it is expanding over millions and billions of years. Our lucky 70 is a blink of an eye in this cosmic context.
“Deep Time is fragmented, something qualitatively different from the richly interwoven tapestry of time afforded by our everyday experience, what I call 'everyday time' or 'ordinary time'.” - In search of deep time: beyond the fossil record to a new history of life by Henry Gee (1999)
According to James Hutton, one of the first geologists, thinking in deep time means taking a longer view. Richard Fisher, the author of the book, The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time (2023), and the author of The Long View: A Field Guide Substack site, mentioned Katie Paterson’s project of the Future Library (2014), which has long been on my list of artworks to follow. Fisher discussed examples of ‘long-minded art’ in this article, and being interested and invested in everything that is (what I call) the ‘impossibilities of comprehension’, my attention got hooked by the project.
‘Thinking in deep time’ and even ‘long-minded’-ness have somewhat similar meanings. Both cover the idea of working (or creating) with time. How is that possible? Well, as limited as humans can be in this vast mass of energy (we call the Universe) just as creative and imaginative they are with the rare potential of mentally tricking the shortcomings of the (human) logic of the Universe, the things that do not make sense after a certain point.
Katie Paterson is one of the handful but greatly alluring artists working with deep time, the Earth, and the sky. Her mind-bending projects are ones to be paid attention to in the long term. In her 2022 TED talk, The Mind-Bending Art of Deep Time, she said “We are not born out of nothing, the sea, the sky, the Earth, the air. We’re made of the same stuff, we coexist.”. What is it if not deep time and deep space that made our existence happen to be possible?
The Future Library
100 books sealed in glass panels for 100 years written by 100 authors on paper made from the Norwegian woods in Oslo where the project is located. Just the way it sounds mesmerizing to a book lover, the same way, it makes the mind so impatient screaming “But I want to see!”. Then the realization came: we are not going to be alive in 2114, at least I am for sure not. And this is crazy to think about. Forget wrapping your head around millions of years! It is already hard enough to imagine this project has the potential to outlive us.
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The concept of a library is essentially that of collecting, storing, categorizing, and sharing knowledge in its tangible forms like books and discs. Simple, yet has a huge significance. Forests are essential parts of the Earth, a fundamental part of natural ecosystems. What if libraries are just a fundamental part of the human ecosystem? And what does this art project mean in the wider and long-term context of humanity? It would be selfish to say that trees grow to enable humans to produce books, but there is also truth in it. The Future Library is mastering a symbiotic relationship between the Earth, woods, humans, and knowledge. And I am truly fascinated by this, and I think it carries great symbolic value.
Visualizing standing in the Norwegian woods, just outside Oslo, I imagine having a sublime experience, looking at the depth of greenness at the crux of natural and human-dreamt beauty. Experiencing a century-long piece of art breathing in the crisp air of a Northern forest and knowing you will not be there when they open up the small glass time capsules with the written pages of great contemporary authors. My curiosity is so immense, that I could go inside and read it all, but I cannot, and neither can you, and that is the most satisfying answer one needs to accept as proof of our ephemeral existence.
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Memento Mori
Art, yet again, makes humans realize their mortality. They call it memento mori. The memory of your mortality and that you will die inevitably. We are becoming stardust again, grains in the fabric of the Universe. I think it is an alluring maneuver in the Universe induced by humans, crossing over time and space… reminding us of how little time we actually have, while extending its lifetime until future generations will be born to see and unlock the secrets buried in glass panels these authors of our time have hidden for them.
So how does this library evoke memento mori? It proves that knowledge can far outlive us. Textual knowledge by hundreds of years, knowledge only stored in energy is eternal consisting of deep time, and we are only a grain of sand on the shores of the Universe.