A big part of Why I Write (aside from the free booze at parties every 5 years or so, of course) is to achieve some sort of immortality. I’m pretty conscious of being a tiny speck in the universe, and a tiny speck in the flow of time since the Big Bang. I’m aware that the vast majority of people don’t achieve any kind of lasting fame, and the even vaster percentage of writers get swept aside. It’s shocking, for example, to learn that The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace, two books that dominated much of my high school English courses, are now slowly fading into obscurity. Slowly, yes, but fading. I mean, shit; if Salinger can fade into obscurity, we’re all fucked.
But of course it makes sense: Part of what makes it always seem like books were better in previous eras is the simple fact that history’s manic fingers have scubbed away the dross: All that’s left after 100 or 200 years is the really significant work. The merely great eventually gets swept aside. So, maybe Salinger and Knowles were merely great, and not Great, know what I mean? They hung on for 50 years, but won’t make 100. We can’t all be Shakespeare, after all.
And then there’s me: I suspect I don’t stand a chance.
Of course, if we want to look at it with the Big View it doesn’t matter because the sun will swell up and destroy the Earth eventually, anyway, and even if we flee the burning globe for other planets, entropy will catch us, babies, and swallow everything eventually. So why bother? Since we can’t even invent a comsumer-usable jetpack, I doubt we’re ever going to conquer quantum physics and find a way to step out of time and become truly eternal. So you have to have some perspective. The fact is, culture changes and the world moves on, and you’re lucky if you’re still relevant a decade after you first appear in print (or on film, or on the radio, or whatever).
When I was a kid, there were certain things that linked me with older generations whether I realized it or not: Bugs Bunny cartoons. The Honeymooners. The Brady Bunch – all of these weird pop cultural icons had been around for so long, people 20 years older than me knew them as well and we had a shared vocabulary. A lot of that has faded away. You can’t easily see unedtited Warner Bros cartoons any more, due to the excessive violence, occasional racism, and cheery 1940s slang. Those old sitcoms that stretch back to the 1950s and 1960s may still be on, somewhere, but it’ll be on a ghetto like Nick at Nite or something. My friend Ken and I had an extended joke concerning old Bugs Bunny cartoons the other night and it occurred to me that people 10 years younger than us (or maybe 20 years younger) might not understand a word we were saying – this is culture leaving you behind.
Which is okay. It’s a natural function, and I actually think this has been artificially retarded over the last 50 years due to television, maybe over the last 100 years due to radio and movies. It wasn’t until radio and other modern media, after all, that everyone in the country, or at least a large proportion of them, could simultaneously share a pop culture moment, then go into work the next day and discuss it immediately. And as The Entertainment Industry fractures into a million pay services that cater to your personal taste, we’re leaving that era behind. I grew up in a world with three networks and four local TV stations, a world where every major city had a handful of radio stations serving broad genres. Today you can choose from hundreds of stations and on-demand movies etc, you can buy Satellite Radio, you can massage your cultural experience into something unique and completely unshared by anyone else.
Which means when you go into work the next day, you might not have anything to talk about. Except the last bastion of shared experience, sports, and occasional movies that hit that blockbuster status.
I think we’ve hit that stage where Jeff is a little drunk and rambling, so let’s wrap it up. In closing, I think it would be best if I simply attain the wealth and power necessary to build a monument to myself, sort of like Bender’s “Remember Me” statue from Futurama:
I think you’ve exactly hit on the reason why “sharing” via social media has become so pervasive – in an age where one’s cultural experience is so customized, we still want to be able to have that common pop culture moment with everyone else. The “viral” spread of information is just a desire to have something in common with others.
On the other hand, I have sent you five bucks for your Giant Statue of Jeff Somers fund, so maybe we’ll all rally around that in the future.
Even Shakespeare experienced periods of relative obscurity. Considering how available literature and information are nowadays, and the ever growing population of the world, I think those authors stand a chance of being remembered until their language goes completely out of fashion.
It’s probably more about the language than anything else.