What does it mean to be forgotten? People forget things nearly everyday, whether it be a pen, a wallet, a watch, etc. These are minor inconveniences which serve at most to irritate us and possibly necessitate a trip back home before getting on with the day. There is something largely different, however, about forgetting a human being, something inherently tragic about being irretrievable to public memory such that it’s disagreeable to us. We wish to know people. It is a pity when we cannot know them.
It is why when you look at the oil painting above by Sir Thomas Lawrence in 1793, you wonder who the young man in the portrait is; why your eyes fall down to the plaque below to find that his name was Charles William Bell and that nothing is known of him beyond this; your eyes then meet his again and you wonder what he might have been like, what made him laugh, and if he wanted to be forgotten.
On the face of it, it seems an odd question with an obvious answer: of course, no one wants to be forgotten. In truth, a great deal of the actions carried out by humankind are done with an eye to posterity. This is not to say that at the forefront of these feats there is always a plea to be remembered; there are a thousand and one reasons for everything, and feats are undertaken not just for profound reasons but for ephemeral ones, as well: envy, hubris, love, hatred, curiosity. But even if Michelangelo laid on his back for four years painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with resentment in his heart, and although Virginia Woolf penned Orlando out of true affection for her lover, it is still strangely easy to picture these men and women who we now hold up as luminaries simply going about their craft day by day, somewhere deep within them, perhaps half buried, perhaps not, a desire that their work will survive past their age. Being known, it would seem, is the closest anyone can get to eternity.
One sees the same lure of eternity dangled over soldiers, rallied by generals into battle on the promise that they will remember what you have done here today. More often than is just, they do not remember what you did there that day. The man in the painting of battle above represents countless men throughout human history made into soldiers who have perished without a name, remnant, or even a thought left as evidence of their existence.
On the question of what it truly means to be forgotten, there lies an intrinsic link between forgetting and death; forgetting is a kind of end, a sort of death. In a species such as humanity who grew up in groups, being forgotten or left behind meant increased risk of death. It may not be so radical to assume that a species which spent its entire existence clawing its way with bloody nails to survive still yearns for more, some way to survive even beyond the limit.
But death is only a threat to the living; why do we fear being forgotten even after our death? This may have something to do with another link, the one between memory and importance: if something is important, you remember it. In a sense, this is a fallacy. Seemingly useless and unimportant information is stored in our memories at any given time; and even more often, we forget things of great importance — no one remembers the identity of the first Neanderthal to bury their dead, but that does not mean they were not important, or that they did not influence how Homo sapiens organized their burial rituals for the next tens of thousands of years.
Nor is being remembered always a positive thing. Not everything is done with the purpose of being remembered and there are also many people who, in spite of their best efforts, are remembered. This happens most often in the form of those who are remembered for something they did not want to be. It is doubtful that Caligula wanted to be remembered for nearly making his horse a senator, or waging war on Poseidon.
In light of these rationales, one might think that being forgotten after death should not be such a distressing concept to such an enormous swath of the human race. Why then, when standing in a crowded art museum, gazing on a painting of a stranger lost to time, does a creeping melancholy weave itself around the heart? It could very well be that Charles William Bell never wanted to be remembered, but we will never know.
Perhaps it is in the wanting that the answer is found. It is the very fact that no matter what we want, we do not get to choose — do not get to choose what we are remembered for, or if we are remembered at all. That each of our signatures is forged before we are conscious of it, that the contract of life and destiny is written up and filed away before we might refuse or request an amendment. Perhaps it is destiny’s indifference to human hopes that makes forgetting just another actor in the grand tragedy of life.