A fall of snow is a sudden hushed delight so overwhelming in its transformation of the world about us that we rush to take pictures of it, as I did in mid-January. But the sense of wonder lasts only as long as the snow is virginal, which isn’t long. Soon it becomes a freezing, inconvenient, dangerous blight that over-stays its welcome.
Then as swiftly as it came it turns to drips from trees and gutters, puddles underfoot, soggy cardboard boxes left outside until, in a blink of an eye, it’s gone both in reality and, almost, memory. In fact few things become a distant memory as fast as snow.
The photographs we took vanish almost as completely as the substance itself, no more than binary traces in Random Access Memory, which we never access again. Or, for those who can still remember film, pictures of snow in years gone by are consigned to packets of photographs, shoved in boxes, and left to congeal in the darkness of cupboards and attics where only dust continues to fall.
Our memory too, whether individual, familial or communal, is astoundingly short-term. If it was used as a diagnostic test of our functional competence we would fail. I am talking about historical memory about fundamentally important things like who we are, where we came from and the obstacles we overcame to arrive where we are now. We lose the memory of these things so fast, both individually and collectively, that it’s awesome: what was once so important vanishes from our lives as if it never was.
For example, none of us would exist at all but for the life-long struggles, loves, tribulations and brief triumphs of our great grand-parents. But ask most people who theirs were, what they did, where they lived and they usually do not know. Or if they know something it reduces a life to a single short sentence, probably inaccurate. My maternal great grandfather George Robinson ‘went to America’ – that’s all I know. His paternal counterpart is lost to me entirely.
Most of us know only little more about our grand-parents and when we do it’s in the form of inaccurate snippets of places, years, names, maybe occupations. Rarely lives. It’s horrible to admit, but our children know, really know, very little about us.
It will not take long for us to cease to exist, as if we have never been.
I live near a very large cemetery, so funeral processions go past my door regularly. Occasionally I pop across the street to observe the burials, it being free, open to the public, and full of character and interest for a novelist. But once the day of burial is past the floral tributes die, soon piled in a distant corner of the cemetery where they cannot so easily be seen; and the cemetery visits become less and less frequent, except for a few who cling on to memory, unable or unwilling to let go. Until they too die and the graves begin to get covered in lichen, begin to rest in peace.
I am not Jewish but I like to visit that section of the cemetery because there are no floral tributes, no jam jars filled with dead flowers and dirty water, no faded ribbon. Just, here and there, a few pebbles, piled like a cairn in a mountain wilderness.
There was a fashion in earlier centuries for the creation of church memorials which reminded the living of the how transitory life is, by depicting the deceased in thin, skeletal form, or with a skull as part of the monument. There’s one ten feet up in the nave of Oxford Cathedral I often find staring at me. Do I know his name, or what he did, or even if he was a he? I don’t, but in homage to him and the many forgotten ones like him, I’ll find out next time I attend a service and post the information here where… naturally… it will soon be forgotten once again.
Often, if we return to those images we took so impulsively, we find things we didn’t notice at the time. Like the felled trees in my image of snow in Wytham Wood, near Oxford, which I only see now for what they are: something transitory too, though longer than snow in a temperate climate. But not by much!
From the geological view of things, neither lasted any time at all. If you imagine time since the beginning of prehistory to be that of a game of football, the period up to recorded history is the full ninety minutes; recorded history is extra time; our own lives no more than the blast of the final whistle. Unlike us, however, snow will come back again and again, and again. Each time it will briefly transform the world, and maybe our graves and places of memorial as well, to the delight of those who follow us. As for our great-grandparents, we may not know much about them but we do know this: if they lived their lives where snow once fell, they too knew its virgin beauty and saw it disappear with the sands of time.