The Box of Forgotten Faces: On Memory, Mortality, and Flea Markets

I’m afraid I have some bad news: the memory of your life is destined to end up in an attic, basement, or in a box on the bottom of a sagging shelf in a secondhand store. I know — I pictured a statue of myself in a city park somewhere, but apparently my legacy will fit all too neatly in a box labeled miscellaneous.  Hard medicine.  However, don’t despair. There’s a faint light at the end of this mysterious tunnel, and it comes from photography. Every photograph is an act of defiance against oblivion. Sometimes it works for a decade, sometimes a generation, and occasionally—if the photograph has enough consensus among the 8 billion people in this world, it might endure across centuries.  Think of Edward Curtis and the North American Indian.

Here’s how it works:

Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682), English physician and Christian philosopher, saw no conflict between science and faith. Around 1658, laborers near Norwich unearthed five ancient Roman urns containing bone fragments, ashes, and shards of metal and glass. In their dust, Browne saw not relics but reminders of our impermanence.

In his masterwork Urn-Burial, he confronted the futility of remembrance. Most lives, he observed, endure in memory for only three generations before being downgraded to the lost-and-found of expired identity. Time is the great eraser. A father may linger in stories, but by the time great-grandchildren arrive, even his name is gone. Browne called man “splendid in ashes, pompous in the grave”—a very 17th-century way of saying, “Don’t throw away your urn.”

I can testify to his accuracy. On a low shelf in my office sits a dusty box of family photographs from the early 1900s. By Browne’s reckoning, I am five generations removed. I have no idea who stares back at me, no emotional tether beyond admiring the print. The memory became extinct sometime after 1960, when my mother last pulled the box from her own shelf and passed it to me. Now it sits on mine, and I’m tempted to send it straight to the flea market—why saddle my children with the guilt of doing it later?

I tried salvaging the past: My Aunt Lucy recognized three faces out of twenty; Aunt Lil, aged 102, recognized none. Three generations and out.

Victorians believed photographs could preserve remembrance. If they could afford it, they’d hire a photographer to capture a deceased child, then hang the portrait in the parlor, where the living carried on in quiet company with the dead. It didn’t work. In many museums, albums once cherished now sit mute—every face anonymous.  On the reverse side of a photograph a tender inscription might read, ‘To Nellie, with love’, but the thread that once bound her to remembrance silently snapped and no one noticed when it happened. Browne’s three-generation rule wins again.

At this point, one might simply cradle an urn, surrender to nothingness, and watch Hallmark movies, knowing one’s great-grandchildren will remember only that grandpa watched Hallmark movies.

Let’s not despair. There are two consolations. First, live in the moment. Susan Sontag observed that most photography merely proves, “I was there. I saw something.” A sunset, a flower, a bull elk in rut—images destined to fade even before the next generation. The key is not the photograph, but the savoring of the moment. Take joy in the beam of light that fell across your mother’s hands and face as she gazed out the window one afternoon in late September. Take the picture, yes, but more importantly, be there in that shining moment.

Second, we photograph to fill the hole of forgetfulness. The Victorians feared erasure, so they hung the departed beside the living, hoping to stretch remembrance one heartbreaking generation further.

Yet the spiritual side of Browne reminds us of a deeper, more optimistic truth: While human memory turns to amnesia, God’s remembrance endures, eternal and redemptive. All is not lost.