2From On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for L.docx

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From On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life,
by Friedrich Nietzsche (1874)
Section 1:
CONSIDER the herds that are feeding yonder: they know not
the meaning of yesterday or to-day; they graze and ruminate,
move or rest, from morning to night, from day to day, taken up
with their little loves and hates, at the mercy of the moment,
feeling neither melancholy nor satiety. Man cannot see them
without regret, for even in the pride of his humanity he looks
enviously on the beast's happiness. He wishes simply to live
without satiety or pain, like the beast; yet it is all in vain, for he
will not change places with it. He may ask the beast—"Why do
you look at me and not speak to me of your happiness?" The
beast wants to answer—"Because I always forget what I wished
to say": but he forgets this answer too, and is silent; and the
man is left to wonder.
He wonders also about himself, that he cannot learn to forget,
but hangs on the past: however far or fast he run, that chain
runs with him. It is matter for wonder: the moment, that is here
and gone, that was nothing before and nothing after, returns like
a spectre to trouble the quiet of a later moment. A leaf is
continually dropping out of the volume of time and fluttering
away and suddenly it flutters back into the man's lap. Then he
says, "I remember . . . ," and envies the beast, that forgets at
once, and sees every moment really die, sink into night and
mist, extinguished for ever. The beast lives unhistorically; for it
"goes into" the present, like a number, without leaving any
curious remainder. It cannot dissimulate, it conceals nothing; at
every moment it seems what it actually is, and thus can be

nothing that is not honest. But man is always resisting the great
and continually increasing weight of the past; it presses him
down, and bows his shoulders; he travels with a dark invisible
burden that he can plausibly disown, and is only too glad to
disown in converse with his fellows—in order to excite their
envy. And so it hurts him, like the thought of a lost Paradise, to
see a herd grazing, or, nearer still, a child, that has nothing yet
of the past to disown, and plays in a happy blindness between
the walls of the past and the future. And yet its play must be
disturbed, and only too soon will it be summoned from its little
kingdom of oblivion. Then it learns to understand the words
"once upon a time," the "open sesame" that lets in battle,
suffering and weariness on mankind, and reminds them what
their existence really is, an imperfect tense that never becomes
a present. And when death brings at last the desired
forgetfulness, it abolishes life and being together, and sets the
seal on the knowledge that "being" is merely a continual "has
been," a thing that lives by denying and destroying and
contradicting itself.
If happiness and the chase for new happiness keep alive in any
sense the will to live, no philosophy has perhaps more truth
than the cynic's: for the beast's happiness, like that of the
perfect cynic, is the visible proof of the truth of cynicism. The
smallest pleasure, if it be only continuous and make one happy,
is incomparably a greater happiness than the more intense
pleasure that comes as an episode, a wild freak, a mad interval
between ennui, desire, and privation. But in the smallest and
greatest happiness there is always one thing that makes it
happiness: the power of forgetting, or, in more learned phrase,
the capacity of feeling "unhistorically" throughout its duration.
One who cannot leave himself behind on the threshold of the
moment and forget the past, who cannot stand on a single point,
like a goddess of victory, without fear or giddiness, will never
know what happiness is; and, worse still, will never do anything
to make others happy. The extreme case would be the man
without any power to forget, who is condemned to see

"becoming" everywhere. Such a man believes no more in
himself or his own existence, he sees everything fly past in an
eternal succession, and loses himself in the stream of becoming.
At last, like the logical disciple of Heraclitus, he will hardly
dare to raise his finger. Forgetfulness is a property of all action;
just as not only light but darkness is bound up with the life of
every organism. One who wished to feel everything historically,
would be like a man forcing himself to refrain from sleep, or a
beast who had to live by chewing a continual cud. Thus even a
happy life is possible without remembrance, as the beast shows:
but life in any true sense is absolutely impossible without
forgetfulness. Or, to put my conclusion better, there is a degree
of sleeplessness, of rumination, of "historical sense," that
injures and finally destroys the living thing, be it a man or a
people or a system of culture.
To fix this degree and the limits to the memory of the past, if it
is not to become the gravedigger of the present, we must see
clearly how great is the " plastic power " of a man or a
community or a culture; I mean the power of specifically
growing out of one's self, of making the past and the strange
one body with the near and the present, of healing wounds,
replacing what is lost, repairing broken moulds. There are men
who have this power so slightly that a single sharp experience, a
single pain, often a little injustice, will lacerate their souls like
the scratch of a poisoned knife. There are others, who are so
little injured by the worst misfortunes, and even by their own
spiteful actions, as to feel tolerably comfortable, with a fairly
quiet conscience, in the midst of them,—or at any rate shortly
afterwards. The deeper the roots of a man's inner nature, the
better will he take the past into himself; and the greatest and
most powerful nature would be known by the absence of limits
for the historical sense to overgrow and work harm. It would
assimilate and digest the past, however foreign, and turn it to
sap. Such a nature can forget what it cannot subdue; there is no
break in the horizon, and nothing to remind it that there are still
men, passions, theories and aims on the other side. This is a

universal law; a living thing can only be healthy, strong and
productive within a certain horizon: if it be incapable of
drawing one round itself, or too selfish to lose its own view in
another's, it will come to an untimely end. Cheerfulness, a good
conscience, belief in the future, the joyful deed, all depend, in
the individual as well as the nation, on there being a line that
divides the visible and clear from the vague and shadowy: we
must know the right time to forget as well as the right time to
remember; and instinctively see when it is necessary to feel
historically, and when unhistorically. This is the point that the
reader is asked to consider; that the unhistorical and the
historical are equally necessary to the health of an individual, a
community, and a system of culture.
Every one has noticed that a man's historical knowledge and
range of feeling may be very limited, his horizon as narrow as
that of an Alpine valley, his judgments incorrect and his
experience falsely supposed original, and yet in spite of all the
incorrectness and falsity he may stand forth in unconquerable
health and vigour, to the joy of all who see him; whereas
another man with far more judgment and learning will fail in
comparison, because the lines of his horizon are continually
changing and shifting, and he cannot shake himself free from
the delicate network of his truth and righteousness for a
downright act of will or desire. We saw that the beast,
absolutely " unhistorical," with the narrowest of horizons, has
yet a certain happiness, and lives at least without hypocrisy or
ennui ; and so we may hold the capacity of feeling (to a certain
extent) unhistorically, to be the more important and elemental,
as providing the foundation of every sound and real growth,
everything that is truly great and human. The unhistorical is
like the surrounding atmosphere that can alone create life, and
in whose annihilation life itself disappears. It is true that man
can only become man by first suppressing this unhistorical
element in his thoughts, comparisons, distinctions, and
conclusions, letting a clear sudden light break through these
misty clouds by his power of turning the past to the uses of the

present. But an excess of history makes him flag again, while
without the veil of the unhistorical he would never have the
courage to begin. What deeds could man ever have done if he
had not been enveloped in the dust-cloud of the unhistorical?
Or, to leave metaphors and take a concrete example, imagine a
man swayed and driven by a strong passion, whether for a
woman or a theory. His world is quite altered. He is blind to
everything behind him, new sounds are muffled and
meaningless; though his perceptions were never so intimately
felt in all their colour, light and music, and he seems to grasp
them with his five senses together. All his judgments of value
are changed for the worse; there is much he can no longer value,
as he can scarcely feel it: he wonders that he has so long been
the sport of strange words and opinions, that his recollections
have run round in one unwearying circle and are yet too weak
and weary to make a single step away from it. His whole case is
most indefensible; it is narrow, ungrateful to the past, blind to
danger, deaf to warnings, a small living eddy in a dead sea of
night and forgetfulness. And yet this condition, unhistorical and
antihistorical throughout, is the cradle not only of unjust action,
but of every just and justifiable action in the world. No artist
will paint his picture, no general win his victory, no nation gain
its freedom, without having striven and yearned for it under
those very "unhistorical" conditions. If the man of action, in
Goethe's phrase, is without conscience, he is also without
knowledge: he forgets most things in order to do one, he is
unjust to what is behind him, and only recognises one law, the
law of that which is to be. So he loves his work infinitely more,
than it deserves to be loved; and the best works are produced in
such an ecstasy of love that they must always be unworthy of it,
however great their worth otherwise.
Should any one be able to dissolve the unhistorical atmosphere
in which every great event happens, and breathe afterwards, he
might be capable of rising to the "super-historical" standpoint
of consciousness, that Niebuhr has described as the possible
result of historical research. "History," he says, "is useful for

one purpose, if studied in detail: that men may know, as the
greatest and best spirits of our generation do not know, the
accidental nature of the forms in which they see and insist on
others seeing,—insist, I say, because their consciousness of
them is exceptionally intense. Any one who has not grasped this
idea in its different applications will fall under the spell of a
more powerful spirit who reads a deeper emotion into the given
form." Such a standpoint might be called "super-historical," as
one who took it could feel no impulse from history to any
further life or work, for he would have recognised the blindness
and injustice in the soul of the doer as a condition of every
deed: he would be cured henceforth of taking history too
seriously, and have learnt to answer the question how and why
life should be lived, for all men and all circumstances, Greeks
or Turks, the first century or the nineteenth. Whoever asks his
friends whether they would live the last ten or twenty years over
again, will easily see which of them is born for the "super-
historical standpoint": they will all answer no, but will give
different reasons for their answer. Some will say they have the
consolation that the next twenty will be better: they are the men
referred to satirically by David Hume:
"And from the dregs of life hope to receive,
What the first sprightly running could not give."
We will call them the "historical men." Their vision of the past
turns them towards the future, encourages them to persevere
with life, and kindles the hope that justice will yet come and
happiness is behind the mountain they are climbing. They
believe that the meaning of existence will become ever clearer
in the course of its evolution, they only look backward at the
process to understand the present and stimulate their longing for
the future. They do not know how unhistorical their thoughts
and actions are in spite of all their history, and how their
preoccupation with it is for the sake of life rather than mere
science.

“Lynched for Drinking from a White Man’s Well”
By Thomas Laquer
October 11, 2018
London Review of Books, Vol. 40, No. 19
This April, the Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit law firm in
Montgomery,
Alabama, opened a new museum and a memorial in the city,
with the intention, as
the Montgomery Advertiser put it, of encouraging people to
remember ‘the sordid history
of slavery and lynching and try to reconcile the horrors of our
past’. The Legacy Museum
documents the history of slavery, while the National Memorial
for Peace and Justice
commemorates the black victims of lynching in the American
South between 1877 and
1950. For almost two decades the EJI and its executive director,
Bryan Stevenson, have
been fighting against the racial inequities of the American
criminal justice system, and
their legal trench warfare has met with considerable success in
the Supreme Court. This
legal work continues. But in 2012 the organisation decided to
devote resources to a new
strategy, hoping to change the cultural narratives that sustain
the injustices it had been
fighting. In 2013 it published a report called Slavery in
America: The Montgomery Slave
Trade, followed two years later by the first of three reports

under the title Lynching in
America, which between them detailed eight hundred cases that
had never been
documented before.
The United States sometimes seems to be committed to amnesia,
to forgetting its
great national sin of chattel slavery and the violence,
repression, endless injustices and
humiliations that have sustained racial hierarchies since
emancipation. Stevenson has said
that, visiting Germany, he was struck by the number of
memorials to the victims of the
Holocaust: the Stolpersteine, or ‘stumbling stones’, set in the
ground in their thousands to
mark the names of the murdered in the places where they once
lived; the Holocaust
Memorial near the Brandenburg Gate and its subterranean
museum; the thousands of
other reminders all over the country of the evils done in the
name of Germany – maps,
monuments, plaques, preserved concentration camps. Similarly,
the Apartheid Museum
in South Africa bears witness to the racist system that
dominated that country’s history;
monuments and plaques outside the constitutional court in
Johannesburg recognise those
who suffered. There is no remotely comparable memorial
culture in the United States to
the legacy of slavery.
‘Only through grappling with this difficult past can our country
move in a
different direction,’ the Legacy Museum’s brochure begins. But

the past is not past in
Montgomery. ‘You are standing on a site where enslaved people
were warehoused,’ reads
the sign stencilled on a brick wall as you enter the museum. The
first exhibit is a
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holographic slave, about to be auctioned, who speaks to visitors
from a small
underground cage. In the final exhibit holographic prisoners in
orange jumpsuits sit
behind protective glass. The museum traces the line between
slavery and contemporary
incarceration in the US – one in three black men spend time in
prison; the prison
population grew 700 per cent between 1970 and 2005 as crime
dropped; blacks are six
times as likely to be in prison as whites – in the hope that the
present will come to seem
as morally outrageous as the past. The presumption of guilt and
danger that burdens
blacks, especially black men, has a long history.
After slavery comes what the museum calls ‘Era 2: Racial
Terror’, characterised
by lynching. Visitors can use touchscreens to light up
interactive maps that display
lynchings by geographic and chronological density: never fewer
than one lynching a
week for the half-century starting in the 1870s; more than three
a week in the 1890s. The
museum shows how the Black Codes passed by Southern states
after the end of the Civil

War to restrict the occupations, movements and wages of former
slaves led to the rise of
incarceration of blacks for petty crimes, partly as a result of
their inability to pay fines for
small infractions. It also documents the advent of black convict
leasing, when prisoners
were hired out to provide labour to private companies. It is not
hard to see the present in
that past, and some of the continuities are almost parodic. The
notorious 19th-century
Louisiana State Penitentiary is known as Angola after the sugar
plantation on the same
site which was worked by slaves before the Civil War; after the
war it remained a sugar
plantation but was worked instead by black convict labour.
Those not needed on the
plantation were hired out elsewhere. But unlike expensive
privately owned slaves whose
lives mattered, leased convicts were disposable. In bad years the
death rate among leased
prisoners was roughly equivalent to that in the labour camp part
of Auschwitz. ‘Era 3:
Segregation Forever’ documents the legal establishment of a
racial purity regime as strict
as any of its 20th-century European competitors. North Carolina
required not only
separate schools for black and white children but segregation of
textbooks (‘Books shall
not be interchangeable between the white and coloured schools,
but shall continue to be
used by the race first using them’).
It is an ambitious project, an attempt to shift the conscience of
the United States
and to make the EJI’s litigation against systemic and individual
injustices no longer

necessary. The museum aims at redemption through narrative, a
change of heart. Because
Montgomery thrives on civil rights tourism it escapes the
malevolent amnesia and racist
interpretations of the past that remain current in some Southern
towns. In Colfax,
Louisiana, for example, a white mob enraged by the electoral
victory of an alliance of
black voters and white Republican supporters of Reconstruction
murdered about 150
black men on Easter Sunday 1873. (The precise number is
unknowable.) Three whites
died. The Louisiana Historical Marker programme put up a
plaque to mark the event in
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1950, at the dawn of the black civil rights movement and the
beginning of a new phase of
Confederate commemoration. It reads: ‘On this site occurred the
Colfax Riot in which
three white men and 150 Negroes were slain. This event on
April 13, 1873, marked the
end of the carpetbag misrule in the South.’ This, of course, is
racist doublespeak: the
‘misrule’ involved securing civil and economic rights for
blacks; there was no ‘riot’. The
obfuscation cannot be innocent. A private marker placed in the
Colfax cemetery in 1921
– at the tail end of the first major phase of Confederate
commemorations – is more direct:
‘Erected to the memory of the heroes … Stephen Decatur
Parish, James West Hadnot,
Sidney Harris, who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White

Supremacy, April 13, 1873.’
When EJI arrived in Montgomery there were more than fifty
memorials of one
sort or another to the glories of the Confederacy. They included
a gold star on the steps of
the state capitol, to mark the spot where Jefferson Davis – the
president of the
Confederate States between 1861 and 1865 – was inaugurated
and the slave nation was
formed. There were no reminders of the city’s role as one of the
most important centres
of the Southern slave trade. In late 2013 the EJI dedicated the
first of several plaques that
referred to this history. One is in front of its offices: ‘At this
location, 122 Commerce
Street, was a very large warehouse owned by John Murphey,
who provided support to the
slave traders in the city.’ ‘I would have preferred not to have
the additional markers,’ the
mayor confessed, ‘but I believe they are part of history.’ He
agreed to allow them, he
said, because they would promote history tourism.
In 2014 readers of USA Today voted Montgomery the nation’s
top ‘historic city’.
But Old South nostalgia, not slavery, was the draw. The picture
on the magazine’s story
shows a white carriage drawn by two white horses, with two
happy white couples sitting
in it, and a black man in plantation dress on the box, reins in
hand. They appear in front
of the brightly lit fountain that we now know from another of
EJI’s signs was the site of

the city’s biggest slave market. Tourists also come to visit
places connected with the civil
rights movement. The director of the Alabama Tourist
Department rightly predicted that
the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma march in 2015 would ‘rain
torrents of publicity’ and
permanently increase the number of visitors to the state. His
department sees the city’s
past as comfortably over, and thinks visitors will view with
satisfaction the progress that
has been made. They suggest an itinerary. Day 1: starting in
Birmingham, ‘you will be
enchanted by old and new exhibits that tell the story of a people
and a movement.’ Day 2:
‘travel to Selma across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where the
civil rights march began in
1965 and where law enforcement personnel confronted voting
rights marchers on Bloody
Sunday.’ That’s one way of putting it. Day 3: ‘in Montgomery,
visit the Rosa Parks
Museum and feel what it was like to be arrested for not moving
to the back of the bus.’
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Unlikely. ‘Stop for lunch in downtown Montgomery. Stand in
the pulpit at Dexter
Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church where Dr Martin Luther
King Jr preached.’
My wife and I did stand in the pulpit where Dr King preached,
and sat in the church
office where he and his colleagues planned the bus boycott, and,
at the insistence of our
guide, had our pictures taken behind the lectern from which he

preached one of his most
famous sermons – ‘How long? Not long … The arc of the moral
universe is long, but it
bends toward justice’ – on the state capitol steps just below the
star marking where
Jefferson Davis was inaugurated. At the end of the tour the
guide led our group in singing
‘We Shall Overcome’. Our small group was all black except for
us. Standing where King
had stood I felt something of what religious people might feel at
a shrine.
Just down the street is the Civil Rights Memorial, designed by
Maya Lin and
installed in front of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, whose
earlier headquarters were
burned down by the Ku Klux Klan. Water plays over a flat
polished stone surface on
which are inscribed, in chronological order, twenty landmark
events of the civil rights
movement and the names of 41 martyrs to the cause. As at Lin’s
Vietnam Veterans
Memorial in Washington, visitors can touch the names,
disturbing the smoothness of the
flowing water. (The water is intended as an allusion to the King
James Bible’s version of
Amos 5:24 in King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech: ‘we will not be
satisfied until justice rolls
down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.’)
The Legacy Museum is a little further down the main street. It
is, astonishingly,
the first museum detailing the history of slavery in the United
States. In contrast, a
spectacular research centre and memorial has stood for 25 years

on the National Mall in
Washington, remembering a crime that the United States did not
commit – the Holocaust.
Two years ago the National Museum of African American
History and Culture opened
near it, an architecturally striking shrine to the history of
African Americans in the US.
Slavery and the slave trade have their place, but so does a
sampling from the history of
black culture – music, entrepreneurship, the press, the Harlem
Renaissance. There are
two small exhibits on lynching. It is balanced. And it leaves
visitors feeling good. The top
and most extensive floor represents an escape from the crimes
of the past. Here is the
customised red convertible Cadillac Eldorado that belonged to
Chuck Berry; here too is
Michael Jackson’s fedora, Lightnin’ Hopkins’s guitar, Louis
Armstrong’s trumpet. There
is a large temporary exhibition about Oprah Winfrey. ‘She has a
place in the museum
with a long line of women who did extraordinary things in their
time – Harriet Tubman,
Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Maya Angelou – women who
worked to redeem the soul
of America,’ the director writes. It is decidedly not a museum of
slavery.
*
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About half a mile from the Legacy Museum in Montgomery –
past the site of the

city’s busiest slave market, past the Jefferson Davis
Apartments, past the Hank Williams
museum, which houses his 1963 blue Cadillac convertible and
17 of his suits, not far
from the Rosa Parks Museum with her distinctive glasses on
display – is the six-acre site
of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. It is a memorial
to the victims of the
more than four thousand documented ‘racial terror lynchings’ of
blacks by whites.
Lynching – charivari at its most violent, a murderous popular
enforcement of majority
community values – has nowhere else in the world been
employed for as long or as often
as in the United States. There are incidences of it in some
Central American countries
with weak governments; it is now on the rise in India. But it is
indigenous here. Before
the Civil War whites were the primary victims, especially but
not exclusively in the
relatively lawless west. After it, close to 75 per cent of
lynchings were in the deep South;
more than 90 per cent of the victims were black.
There were other lynchings, of course: mobs murdered an
unknown number of
Mexicans – in the thousands – by hanging, burning and
shooting, particularly in the
south-western states. Foreigners were often victims. In 1891 a
huge mob lynched 11
Italian Americans in New Orleans because some of them had
been acquitted in a murder
trial; in 1899 five Sicilians, all from one village, were lynched
in the tiny town of
Tallulah, Louisiana for allegedly murdering a prominent local

doctor. They hadn’t. There
were scores of lynchings of Chinese in California. All these are
even more profoundly
forgotten than the lynchings of blacks in the South. Whites were
also lynched: Wobblies
in the labour wars in the north-west in 1919; Leo Frank, a Jew
wrongly convicted of
murder, in Marietta, Georgia in 1915.
But the story of African Americans constitutes a special case.
No other post-slave
society turned to terror lynching to maintain white racial
dominance. At the memorial’s
threshold is a sculpture, by the Ghanaian artist Kwame Akoto-
Bamfo, representing
slavery. Seven near-naked life-size figures – men, women,
children, infants – are
shackled. An eighth, empty set of shackles represents one of
their number who has
already been sold. As the Legacy Museum argues, terror
lynching is a continuation of the
antebellum regime and a link to the present. Under a large open
pavilion eight hundred
steel columns hang from rope-like rods, all the same powdery
reddish-brown rusty colour
as the shackles in the slavery statue. Each of them bears the
names of those murdered in
one of eight hundred counties. Outside, eight hundred coffin-
like replicas of the columns
lie on the ground as if they held the remains of victims of a
natural disaster or terror
attack. They are waiting to be claimed by counties throughout
the South and returned to
them as memorials. Like other gatherings of names – the
Vietnam Memorial, Yad
Vashem, the Menin Gate and the names in memorial books like

Serge Klarsfeld’s French
Children of the Holocaust – this abstraction of large numbers,
the numerical sublime,
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demands attention.＊ These dead. These specific, enumerated
dead. Elbert Williams,
lynched in Brownsville, Tennessee in 1940 for working to
register black votes – and so
on by the thousand.
Between the hanging columns and the field of coffin-like
memorials visitors pass
a coffer containing dirt from various lynching sites, a wall with
water flowing over it
dedicated to the ‘unknown victims of lynching’, blocks of
poetry and panels that give the
pretexts for selected lynching, a hodgepodge of offences, large
and small, against the
niceties of racial domination: Henry Bedford lynched for
‘talking disrespectfully to a
young white man’; Jesse Thornton for ‘addressing a white
police officer without the title
“mister”’; Malcom Wright for ‘yielding too little of the roadway
to a white man as he
passed in his wagon’. Anthony Crawford rejected a ‘white
merchant’s bid for
cottonseed’. Mary Turner was ‘lynched with her unborn child [it
was cut from her belly
and murdered] for complaining about the lynching of her
husband, Hayes Turner’. There

were 11 more lynchings in the rampage that followed.
Suspicion that a black man had murdered a white was probably
the single most
frequent pretext: an existential threat to the racial order. The
EJI does not feature such
cases on the memorial’s walls but documents them in its
research, ghastly precursors of
the miscarriages of justice and disproportionate punishments
against which it is fighting
today. A local paper in Texas informed its readers on 6 May
1922 that, after a thrilling
manhunt, ‘three coloured men were burned here at dawn for the
murder of Eula Ausley,
pretty 17-year-old schoolgirl.’ The men – McKinley Curry,
Johnny Cornish and Mose
Jones – inconveniently delayed the proceedings by insisting on
their innocence, which
made ‘third degree’ methods necessary. These failed to force a
confession. The crowd of
five hundred waited. The men’s bodies were mutilated while
they were still alive, the
article continues, so that ‘no organ of the negroes was allowed
to remain protruding.’
Jones was roped and dragged back and forth over burning coals
until he was dead. Curry
was drenched in oil and set on fire. As the flames rose he
chanted ‘O Lord, I’m acomin’’
so loudly he could be heard all over town. Later that day the
sheriff announced that two
white men – brothers – had been detained in connection with the
murder and that tracks
from the scene of the crime led to their house.
American labour struggles of the 19th and early 20th centuries
were violent

enough, but those that involved black workers were much
worse. These efforts at union
organisation, largely forgotten until now, threatened not only
capitalist profits but the
racial order. ‘Hundreds of black women and children were
lynched in the Elaine
massacre in Phillips County, Arkansas, in 1919,’ a plaque on
the wall of the memorial
reads; there were 257 ‘unknown’ victims, according to the
hanging column (we will
never know the exact number). A local planter and real estate
developer told
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the Arkansas Gazette after the killings that the efforts by the
Progressive Farmers and
Household Union of America to unionise sharecroppers
constituted ‘a deliberately
planned insurrection of the Negroes against the whites’,
masterminded by an organisation
established ‘for the purpose of banding Negroes together for the
killing of white people’.
Roughly 25 per cent of lynchings were on the pretext of rape of
a white woman, and
many more on the excuse of some supposed contact with one.
‘Thomas Miles, Sr …
lynched in Shreveport, Louisiana for allegedly writing a note to
a white woman’; ‘David
Walker, his wife and five children lynched in Hickman,
Kentucky, in 1908 after Mr
Walker was accused of using inappropriate language with a
white woman.’ ‘Warren
Powell, 14’, lynched in 1899 for ‘frightening’ a white girl.

Henry Patterson for asking a
white woman for a drink. Henry Scott, a Pullman porter, thrown
off his train and lynched
for insulting a white woman. An investigation showed that she
was furious because he
had asked her to wait until he finished making up another white
woman’s berth. Actual
sexual relations, even if consensual, met with explosive
violence. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote
that he was moved to activism by reading about the torture and
immolation of Sam Hose
in Georgia in 1899; after his death some of his body parts were
displayed in local stores.
Hose had been accused of killing his employer and raping his
employer’s wife, but a later
investigation showed that the death was an accident and the
rape a fabrication.
‘Every Negro lynched is called a “big burly, black brute”,’
wrote the editors of a
black paper in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, ‘when in
fact many … were
sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement
to fall in love with them,
as is well known to all.’ A few months later the newspaper’s
offices were burned down
and its owners narrowly escaped with their lives; they, along
with two thousand other
blacks, were forced to flee. The so-called Wilmington
Insurrection was, in fact, a coup;
whites, furious at the victory of a mixed-race coalition in a
local election, started a
rampage. At least thirty blacks – the EJI puts the number at
sixty – were murdered.
‘North Carolina is a WHITE MAN’S STATE and WHITE MEN
will rule it,’ the local

paper announced. ‘No other party will ever dare to attempt to
establish negro rule here.’
The rape pretext, like all the others, can be linked to slavery: a
metonym for the white
fear of blacks in revolt. In her 1911 memoirs, Rebecca Latimer
Felton, a leading
Southern advocate of women’s rights but an inveterate racist,
made the link blindingly
obvious: ‘Southern fathers and husbands’, she wrote,
remembered the fear of slave
insurrections during the Civil War, and were ‘desperate as to
remedies’. ‘It is the secret
of lynching instead of a legal remedy. It was “born in the blood
and bred in the bone”,
and a resultant of domestic slavery in the Southern states.’
So, what is to be learned from the EJI’s work in Montgomery?
In the first place,
the convenient power of forgetting. Most of this story is well
documented, unlike the
8
Nazi murders of the Holocaust or the disappeared in Argentina
or apartheid South Africa.
No one sent postcards from Auschwitz with pictures of the
extermination process as they
did of lynchings; pogroms were not announced in newspaper
headlines. The
documentation of the terror memorialised in Montgomery goes
back almost to its
beginning, in the work of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and

the NAACP. There were
at least twenty congressional hearings in decades of failed
efforts at passing federal anti-
lynching laws, from the 1880s on. The Nazis in the 1930s were
amazed that the state
could allow such uncontrolled popular violence to go on in full
view. Some lynchings
were secret, but many were held in public and seemed
deliberately to flout state authority.
‘3000 will Burn Negro,’ blared the New Orleans Statesman on
26 June 1919. ‘Negro
Jerky and Sullen as Burning Hour Nears’, reads the header of
one article; the hour of the
lynching is announced in another. Tens if not hundreds of
thousands of people witnessed
or took part in lynchings.
Du Bois’s observation that ‘the slave went free; stood a brief
moment in the sun;
then moved back again toward slavery’ is scholarly orthodoxy.
And yet what we see in
Montgomery still comes as a surprise. We find it hard fully to
take in the reality of the
‘strange fruit’ of the Billie Holiday song. One can read a huge
amount about the
Holocaust and yet, when confronted with the face of a woman
looking up at her killers
from a pit full of naked bodies, still be taken aback. One feels
the same seeing children in
a lynching postcard eating ice cream; a body bearing the
scrawled sign ‘This nigger tried
to vote’; or the wedding ring worn by a black woman who hangs
from a tree in front of a
great crowd while horses graze in the background.

In a 1909 article called ‘Lynching, Our National Crime’, Ida B.
Wells identified
another, unassimilable strangeness: ‘No other nation, civilised
or savage, burns its
criminals,’ she writes. ‘Only under that Stars and Stripes is the
human holocaust
possible.’ Europe had not seen public burnings since the
Spanish Inquisition and the
burning of heretics after the Reformation. Racial terror was
more than instrumental: the
hundreds of carnivalesque burnings and hangings were ritually
constitutive of the white
South, a holocaust in its Old Testament sense. Lynchings were
sometimes responses to
primitive fears of the sort we usually connect to the early
modern European witchcraft
trials and medieval pogroms: Charlotte Harris was lynched in
Rockingham County,
Virginia ‘after a white man’s barn burned down’; three people
were lynched because the
white family for whom they were working claimed to have been
poisoned; seven black
people were lynched near Screamer, Alabama for drinking from
a white person’s well.
*
9
The scale of the terror and its consequences are incompatible
with its place in
public consciousness. Far fewer people died in the Kishinev
Pogroms of 1903 – which

shook the world, changed Western immigration policies, and
became until the Holocaust
emblematic of the vulnerability of Jews in the diaspora – than
were killed in the Elaine
massacre in a tiny Arkansas town that no one has ever heard of.
The deaths in Colfax
exceed the number of Jews killed on Kristallnacht. Of course,
most lynchings were
individual murders, the bodies left hanging and riddled with
bullets. But they happened in
their thousands: it was still a reign of terror.
The public assertion of facts and their placing in the landscape
matters. The
Legacy Museum is built on the site of a slave warehouse; earth
from lynching sites sits in
jars among other exhibits. It is hard to escape the enormity of
the crimes the EJI
documents, and for which no one was ever punished. All this
narrative work has been
carried out in the hope that the recognition of past wrongs and
moral blindness will make
those in the present not only recognise our complicity in this
history but also the
continuity of past and present. The black man lynched for
‘standing around’ in a white
neighbourhood in 1892 or the man lynched after being accused
of vagrancy in Garyville,
Louisiana in 1917 ought to remind us of Trayvon Martin, the
17-year-old shot in 2012 in
Sanford, Florida by a neighbourhood watch volunteer who
thought he looked out of place
in a white neighborhood, or of Eric Garner, choked and killed
on Staten Island in 2014 by
police who were arresting him for selling untaxed cigarettes.

These are not lynchings but
they are the offspring of the forces that sustained lynching and
of an unequal criminal
justice system.
The EJI thinks that when the counties in which lynchings took
place claim the
duplicate memorials – many have expressed an interest in doing
so next year – a moral
reckoning will begin. In a few places outside the South this has
started. Duluth,
Minnesota, where three black circus workers were lynched in
1920 for a rape that never
happened is a hopeful case: statues commemorating the dead
were installed in 2003. But
in Jonesboro, Arkansas the proposal made by Gary Edwards,
who teaches at the local
university, to put up a plaque recognising a 1920 lynching has
met with resistance. He
suggested in a local newspaper that a production at the local
arts centre of A Raisin in the
Sun – a play by a black playwright with an all-black cast about
the travails of a black
family in Chicago in the 1950s – might be an occasion to
remember a lynching that took
place almost a century ago. The mayor was not in favour, and it
seems unlikely that
Jonesboro will be keen to claim the EJI’s memorial, which lists
four more lynchings in
the county.
My sense is that Bryan Stevenson’s real hope for what he calls
‘narrative work’ is
a sort of Christian piercing of the heart by whatever passes for

the holy spirit these days:
10
something like the conversions of old. In his book Just Mercy
(2014) he tells the story of
a racist prison guard who had consistently given him and his
client a hard time before
suddenly becoming sympathetic after hearing in court about the
boy’s suffering in foster
home after foster home. ‘I came up in foster care,’ the guard
confessed. He thought no
one had had it as bad as he had. The guard spoke of his anger,
and Stevenson told him
that the bad things that happen to us do not define who we are.
No one is as bad as their
worst moments. One would like to believe that remembering a
difficult history can
change hearts, but this does not seem like a hopeful moment in
the United States for
mastering a past of racial injustice.
The Futurist Manifesto
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque
lamps whose brass
cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were
illuminated by the

internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our
native sloth on opulent
Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits
of logic and scrawling
the paper with demented writing.
Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling
ourselves standing quite
alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing
the army of enemy
stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone with the
engineers in the infernal
stokeholes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which
rage in the belly of rogue
locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wings
against the walls.
Then we were suddenly distracted by the rumbling of huge
double decker trams that
went leaping by, streaked with light like the villages celebrating
their festivals, which
the Po in flood suddenly knocks down and uproots, and, in the
rapids and eddies of a
deluge, drags down to the sea.
Then the silence increased. As we listened to the last faint
prayer of the old canal
and the crumbling of the bones of the moribund palaces with
their green growth of
beard, suddenly the hungry automobiles roared beneath our
windows.
`Come, my friends!' I said. `Let us go! At last Mythology and
the mystic cult of the
ideal have been left behind. We are going to be present at the
birth of the centaur

and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down
the gates of life to
test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is they very
first sunrise on earth!
Nothing equals the splendor of its red sword which strikes for
the first time in our
millennial darkness.'
We went up to the three snorting machines to caress their
breasts. I lay along mine
like a corpse on its bier, but I suddenly revived again beneath
the steering wheel - a
guillotine knife - which threatened my stomach. A great sweep
of madness brought
us sharply back to ourselves and drove us through the streets,
steep and deep, like
dried up torrents. Here and there unhappy lamps in the windows
taught us to
despise our mathematical eyes. `Smell,' I exclaimed, `smell is
good enough for wild
beasts!'
And we hunted, like young lions, death with its black fur
dappled with pale crosses,
who ran before us in the vast violet sky, palpable and living.
And yet we had no ideal Mistress stretching her form up to the
clouds, nor yet a
cruel Queen to whom to offer our corpses twisted into the shape
of Byzantine rings!
No reason to die unless it is the desire to be rid of the too great
weight of our
courage!

We drove on, crushing beneath our burning wheels, like shirt-
collars under the iron,
the watch dogs on the steps of the houses.
Death, tamed, went in front of me at each corner offering me his
hand nicely, and
sometimes lay on the ground with a noise of creaking jaws
giving me velvet glances
from the bottom of puddles.
`Let us leave good sense behind like a hideous husk and let us
hurl ourselves, like
fruit spiced with pride, into the immense mouth and breast of
the world! Let us feed
the unknown, not from despair, but simply to enrich the
unfathomable reservoirs of
the Absurd!'
As soon as I had said these words, I turned sharply back on my
tracks with the mad
intoxication of puppies biting their tails, and suddenly there
were two cyclists
disapproving of me and tottering in front of me like two
persuasive but contradictory
reasons. Their stupid swaying got in my way. What a bore!
Pouah! I stopped short,
and in disgust hurled myself - vlan! - head over heels in a ditch.
Oh, maternal ditch, half full of muddy water! A factory gutter! I
savored a mouthful
of strengthening muck which recalled the black teat of my
Sudanese nurse!
As I raised my body, mud-spattered and smelly, I felt the red
hot poker of joy

deliciously pierce my heart. A crowd of fishermen and gouty
naturalists crowded
terrified around this marvel. With patient and tentative care
they raised high
enormous grappling irons to fish up my car, like a vast shark
that had run aground.
It rose slowly leaving in the ditch, like scales, its heavy
coachwork of good sense and
its upholstery of comfort.
We thought it was dead, my good shark, but I woke it with a
single caress of its
powerful back, and it was revived running as fast as it could on
its fins.
Then with my face covered in good factory mud, covered with
metal scratches,
useless sweat and celestial grime, amidst the complaint of staid
fishermen and angry
naturalists, we dictated our first will and testament to all the
living men on earth.
MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM
1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and
rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage,
audacity and
revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility,
ecstasy and
slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish
sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and
the blow
with the fist.

4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched
by a new
beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its
bonnet adorned
with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring
motor car
which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than
the Victory
of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which
crosses
the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and
prodigality to
increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that
has not an
aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the
forces of the
unknown, to force them to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is
the use of
looking behind at the moment when we must open the
mysterious shutters
of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are
already living in
the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent
speed.
9. We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world -
militarism,
patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the
beautiful ideas
which kill, and contempt for woman.

10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality,
feminism
and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure
and revolt;
the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern
capitals: the
nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath
their violent
electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring
smoking
serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of
their
smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the
diabolic cutlery
of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon;
great-breasted
locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses
with long tubes
for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller
sounds like
the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.
It is in Italy that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and
incendiary violence, by
which we today are founding Futurism, because we want to
deliver Italy from its
gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and
antiquaries.
Italy has been too long the great second-hand market. We want
to get rid of the
innumerable museums which cover it with innumerable
cemeteries.

Museums, cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister
juxtaposition of bodies that do
not know each other. Public dormitories where you sleep side
by side for ever with
beings you hate or do not know. Reciprocal ferocity of the
painters and sculptors who
murder each other in the same museum with blows of line and
color. To make a visit
once a year, as one goes to see the graves of our dead once a
year, that we could
allow! We can even imagine placing flowers once a year at the
feet of the Gioconda!
But to take our sadness, our fragile courage and our anxiety to
the museum every
day, that we cannot admit! Do you want to poison yourselves?
Do you want to rot?
What can you find in an old picture except the painful
contortions of the artist trying
to break uncrossable barriers which obstruct the full expression
of his dream?
To admire an old picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral
urn instead of casting
it forward with violent spurts of creation and action. Do you
want to waste the best
part of your strength in a useless admiration of the past, from
which you will emerge
exhausted, diminished, trampled on?
Indeed daily visits to museums, libraries and academies (those
cemeteries of wasted
effort, calvaries of crucified dreams, registers of false starts!) is

for artists what
prolonged supervision by the parents is for intelligent young
men, drunk with their
own talent and ambition.
For the dying, for invalids and for prisoners it may be all right.
It is, perhaps, some
sort of balm for their wounds, the admirable past, at a moment
when the future is
denied them. But we will have none of it, we, the young, strong
and living Futurists!
Let the good incendiaries with charred fingers come! Here they
are! Heap up the fire
to the shelves of the libraries! Divert the canals to flood the
cellars of the museums!
Let the glorious canvases swim ashore! Take the picks and
hammers! Undermine the
foundation of venerable towns!
The oldest among us are not yet thirty years old: we have
therefore at least ten
years to accomplish our task. When we are forty let younger and
stronger men than
we throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts!
They will come
against us from afar, leaping on the light cadence of their first
poems, clutching the
air with their predatory fingers and sniffing at the gates of the
academies the good
scent of our decaying spirits, already promised to the catacombs
of the libraries.
But we shall not be there. They will find us at last one winter's
night in the depths of
the country in a sad hangar echoing with the notes of the

monotonous rain, crouched
near our trembling aeroplanes, warming our hands at the
wretched fire which our
books of today will make when they flame gaily beneath the
glittering flight of their
pictures.
They will crowd around us, panting with anguish and
disappointment, and
exasperated by our proud indefatigable courage, will hurl
themselves forward to kill
us, with all the more hatred as their hearts will be drunk with
love and admiration for
us. And strong healthy Injustice will shine radiantly from their
eyes. For art can only
be violence, cruelty, injustice.
The oldest among us are not yet thirty, and yet we have already
wasted treasures,
treasures of strength, love, courage and keen will, hastily,
deliriously, without
thinking, with all our might, till we are out of breath.
Look at us! We are not out of breath, our hearts are not in the
least tired. For they
are nourished by fire, hatred and speed! Does this surprise you?
it is because you do
not even remember being alive! Standing on the world's summit,
we launch once
more our challenge to the stars!
Your objections? All right! I know them! Of course! We know
just what our beautiful
false intelligence affirms: `We are only the sum and the
prolongation of our
ancestors,' it says. Perhaps! All right! What does it matter? But

we will not listen!
Take care not to repeat those infamous words! Instead, lift up
your head!
Standing on the world's summit we launch once again our
insolent challenge to the
stars!
7
FromHydriotaphia, Urn Burial: Or a discourse of the sepulchral
urns recently found in Norfolk
By Sir Thomas Browne (published 1658)
Chapter V.
Now since these dead bones have already outlasted the living
ones of Methuselah, and in a yard underground, and thin walls
of clay, outworn all the strong and specious buildings above it;
and quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three
conquests: what prince can promise such diuturnity unto his
relicks, or might not gladly say,
Sic ego componi versus in ossa velim?+
+ Tibullus, lib. iii. el. 2, 26. (“when nothing is left of me but
bones, will I be laid to rest?”)
Time, which antiquates antiquities, and hath an art to make dust
of all things, hath yet spared these minor monuments.
In vain we hope to be known by open and visible
conservatories, when to be unknown was the means of their
continuation, and obscurity their protection. If they died by
violent hands, and were thrust into their urns, these bones
become considerable, and some old philosophers would honour
them, whose souls they conceived most pure, which were thus

snatched from their bodies, and to retain a stronger propension
unto them; whereas they weariedly left a languishing corpse and
with faint desires of reunion. If they fell by long and aged
decay, yet wrapt up in the bundle of time, they fall into
indistinction, and make but one blot with infants. If we begin to
die when we live, and long life be but a prolongation of death,
our life is a sad composition; we live with death, and die not in
a moment. How many pulses made up the life of Methuselah,
were work for Archimedes: common counters sum up the life of
Moses his man. Our days become considerable, like petty sums,
by minute accumulations: where numerous fractions make up
but small round numbers; and our days of a span long, make not
one little finger.+
+ According to the ancient arithmetick of the hand, wherein the
little finger of the right hand contracted, signified an hundred.
— Pierius in Hieroglyph.
If the nearness of our last necessity brought a nearer conformity
into it, there were a happiness in hoary hairs, and no calamity in
half-senses. But the long habit of living indisposeth us for
dying; when avarice makes us the sport of death, when even
David grew politickly cruel, and Solomon could hardly be said
to be the wisest of men. But many are too early old, and before
the date of age. Adversity stretcheth our days, misery makes
Alcmena’s nights,+ and time hath no wings unto it. But the most
tedious being is that which can unwish itself, content to be
nothing, or never to have been, which was beyond the
malcontent of Job, who cursed not the day of his life, but his
nativity; content to have so far been, as to have a title to future
being, although he had lived here but in an hidden state of life,
and as it were an abortion.
+ One night as long as three.
What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed
when he hid himself among women, though puzzling
questions,+ are not beyond all conjecture. What time the
persons of these ossuaries entered the famous nations of the
dead, and slept with princes and counsellors, might admit a

wide solution. But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or
what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above
antiquarism; not to be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by
spirits, except we consult the provincial guardians, or tutelary
observators. Had they made as good provision for their names,
as they have done for their relicks, they had not so grossly erred
in the art of perpetuation. But to subsist in bones, and be but
pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration. Vain ashes which in
the oblivion of names, persons, times, and sexes, have found
unto themselves a fruitless continuation, and only arise unto
late posterity, as emblems of mortal vanities, antidotes against
pride, vain-glory, and madding vices. Pagan vain-glories which
thought the world might last for ever, had encouragement for
ambition; and, finding no atropos unto the immortality of their
names, were never dampt with the necessity of oblivion. Even
old ambitions had the advantage of ours, in the attempts of their
vain-glories, who acting early, and before the probable meridian
of time, have by this time found great accomplishment of their
designs, whereby the ancient heroes have already outlasted their
monuments and mechanical preservations. But in this latter
scene of time, we cannot expect such mummies unto our
memories, when ambition may fear the prophecy of Elias,+ and
Charles the Fifth can never hope to live within two Methuselahs
of Hector.+
+ The puzzling questions of Tiberius unto grammarians. —
Marcel. Donatus in Suet.
+ That the world may last but six thousand years.
+ Hector’s fame outlasting above two lives of Methuselah
before that famous prince was extant. (i.e. Hector (approx.
1300-1200 BCE) , whose fame came from Homer’s epic poem,
The Iliad, simply had more time between his life and the end of
time than Charles the Fifth (1500-1558 AD). Browne believes
that the world has passed its “meridian” of time and that we are
now in the second half and approaching the end. Since there is
less time left for humanity, the fame of Charles the Fifth,
regardless of how great he may have been, will be limited

because time is running out. ~CP)
And therefore, restless inquietude for the diuturnity of our
memories unto the present considerations seems a vanity almost
out of date, and superannuated piece of folly. We cannot hope
to live so long in our names, as some have done in their
persons. One face of Janus holds no proportion unto the other.
’Tis too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world
are acted, or time may be too short for our designs. To extend
our memories by monuments, whose death we daily pray for,
and whose duration we cannot hope, without injury to our
expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction
to our beliefs. We whose generations are ordained in this setting
part of time, are providentially taken off from such
imaginations; and, being necessitated to eye the remaining
particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts of
the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration
of that duration, which maketh pyramids pillars of snow, and all
that’s past a moment.
Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortal
right-lined circle+ must conclude and shut up all. There is no
antidote against the opium of time, which temporally
considereth all things: our fathers find their graves in our short
memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our
survivors. Gravestones tell truth scarce forty years. Generations
pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three
oaks. To be read by bare inscriptions like many in Gruter, to
hope for eternity by enigmatical epithets or first letters of our
names, to be studied by antiquaries, who we were, and have new
names given us like many of the mummies, are cold
consolations unto the students of perpetuity, even by everlasting
languages.
+ The character of death, that is, the character of Theta (Θ) in
the Greek alphabet, which looks like a skull.
To be content that times to come should only know there was
such a man, not caring whether they knew more of him, was a
frigid ambition in Cardan; disparaging his horoscopal

inclination and judgment of himself.[footnoteRef:1] Who cares
to subsist like Hippocrates’s patients, or Achilles’s horses in
Homer, under naked nominations, without deserts and noble
acts, which are the balsam of our memories,
the entelechia[footnoteRef:2] and soul of our subsistences? To
be nameless in worthy deeds, exceeds an infamous history. The
Canaanitish woman lives more happily without a name, than
Herodias with one. And who had not rather have been the good
thief, than Pilate? [1: Gerolamo Cardano (1501-76), Italian
mathematician and astrologer. The "inclination" to which
Browne refers may allude to Cardano's publication of the
horoscope of Jesus in 1554, a heretical crime which led to his
imprisonment. The "judgement of himself" is a line from
Cardano's autobiography De vita propria, ch.9, "A meditation
on the perpetuation of my name": (continues on next page)
Non tamen unquam concupivi gloriam aut honores: imo sprevi,
cuperem notum esse quod sim, non opto ut sciatur qualis sim.
In English:
Yet I have never longed for praise and honours; on the contrary,
I have spurned them, wishing it be known only that I had lived,
and having no concern that it be known what manner of man I
was.] [2: Entelechy: The potential of an organism to develop
and realize its existence; the soul.]
But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and
deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of
perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids?
Herostratus lives that burnt the temple of Diana, he is almost
lost that built it. Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian’s
horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our
felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad have
equal durations, and Thersites is like to live as long as
Agamemnon without the favour of the everlasting register. Who
knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be
not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand
remembered in the known account of time? The first man had

been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah’s long life had
been his only chronicle.
Oblivion is not to be hired. The greater part must be content to
be as though they had not been, to be found in the register of
God, not in the record of man. Twenty-seven names make up the
first story and the recorded names ever since contain not one
living century. The number of the dead long exceedeth all that
shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who
knows when was the equinox?[footnoteRef:3] Every hour adds
unto that current arithmetick, which scarce stands one moment.
And since death must be the Lucina of life, and even
Pagans could doubt, whether thus to live were to die; since our
longest sun sets at right descensions, and makes but winter
arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in
darkness, and have our light in ashes; since the brother of
death[footnoteRef:4] daily haunts us with dying mementoes, and
time that grows old in itself, bids us hope no long duration; —
diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation. [3: Browne here
continues to reflect on being past the midpoint of time
(“equinox”) and moving towards its end.] [4: Sleep (Hypnos)
is the brother of Death (Thanatos), sometimes called the “cousin
of death” (Nas, Illmatic)]
Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion
shares with memory a great part even of our living beings; we
slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of
affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no
extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into
stones are fables. Afflictions induce callosities; miseries are
slippery, or fall like snow upon us, which notwithstanding is no
unhappy stupidity. To be ignorant of evils to come, and
forgetful of evils past, is a merciful provision in nature,
whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil days, and,
our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances,
our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions. A great
part of antiquity contented their hopes of subsistency with a

transmigration of their souls — a good way to continue their
memories, while having the advantage of plural successions,
they could not but act something remarkable in such variety of
beings, and enjoying the fame of their passed selves, make
accumulation of glory unto their last durations. Others, rather
than be lost in the uncomfortable night of nothing, were content
to recede into the common being, and make one particle of the
public soul of all things, which was no more than to return into
their unknown and divine original again. Egyptian ingenuity
was more unsatisfied, contriving their bodies in sweet
consistences, to attend the return of their souls. But all is
vanity, feeding the wind, and folly. Egyptian mummies, which
Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy
is become merchandise, Mizraim, cures wounds, and Pharaoh is
sold for balsams.
In vain do individuals hope for immortality, or any patent from
oblivion, in preservations below the moon; men have been
deceived even in their flatteries, above the sun, and studied
conceits to perpetuate their names in heaven. The various
cosmography of that part hath already varied the names of
contrived constellations; Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osyris in
the Dog-star. While we look for incorruption in the heavens, we
find that they are but like the earth; — durable in their main
bodies, alterable in their parts; whereof, beside comets and new
stars, perspectives begin to tell tales, and the spots that wander
about the sun, with Phaeton’s favour, would make clear
conviction.
There is nothing strictly immortal, but immortality. Whatever
hath no beginning, may be confident of no end; — all others
have a dependent being and within the reach of destruction; —
which is the peculiar of that necessary essence that cannot
destroy itself; — and the highest strain of omnipotency, to be so
powerfully constituted as not to suffer even from the power of
itself. But the sufficiency of Christian immortality frustrates all
earthly glory, and the quality of either state after death, makes a
folly of posthumous memory. God who can only destroy our

souls, and hath assured our resurrection, either of our bodies or
names hath directly promised no duration. Wherein there is so
much of chance, that the boldest expectants have found unhappy
frustration; and to hold long subsistence, seems but a scape in
oblivion. But man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and
pompous in the grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with
equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infamy
of his nature.
Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us.
A small fire sufficeth for life, great flames seemed too little
after death, while men vainly affected precious pyres, and to
burn like Sardanapalus; but the wisdom of funeral laws found
the folly of prodigal blazes and reduced undoing fires unto the
rule of sober obsequies, wherein few could be so mean as not to
provide wood, pitch, a mourner, and an urn.
Five languages secured not the epitaph of Gordianus. The man
of God lives longer without a tomb than any by one, invisibly
interred by angels, and adjudged to obscurity, though not
without some marks directing human discovery. Enoch and
Elias, without either tomb or burial, in an anomalous state of
being, are the great examples of perpetuity, in their long and
living memory, in strict account being still on this side death,
and having a late part yet to act upon this stage of earth. If in
the decretory term of the world we shall not all die but be
changed, according to received translation, the last day will
make but few graves; at least quick resurrections will anticipate
lasting sepultures. Some graves will be opened before they be
quite closed, and Lazarus be no wonder. When many that feared
to die, shall groan that they can die but once, the dismal state is
the second and living death, when life puts despair on the
damned; when men shall wish the coverings of mountains, not
of monuments, and annihilations shall be courted.
While some have studied monuments, others have studiously
declined them, and some have been so vainly boisterous, that
they durst not acknowledge their graves; wherein Alaricus
seems most subtle, who had a river turned to hide his bones at

the bottom. Even Sylla, that thought himself safe in his urn,
could not prevent revenging tongues, and stones thrown at his
monument. Happy are they whom privacy makes innocent, who
deal so with men in this world, that they are not afraid to meet
them in the next; who, when they die, make no commotion
among the dead, and are not touched with that poetical taunt of
Isaiah.[footnoteRef:5] [5: Isa. xiv. 16. “Those who see you will
gaze at you, And consider you, saying: 'Is this the man who
made the earth tremble, Who shook kingdoms, ...”
]
Pyramids, arches, obelisks, were but the irregularities of vain-
glory, and wild enormities of ancient magnanimity. But the
most magnanimous resolution rests in the Christian religion,
which trampleth upon pride and sits on the neck of ambition,
humbly pursuing that infallible perpetuity, unto which all others
must diminish their diameters, and be poorly seen in angles of
contingency.+
+ The least of angles.
Pious spirits who passed their days in raptures of futurity, made
little more of this world, than the world that was before it,
while they lay obscure in the chaos of preordination, and night
of their forebeings. And if any have been so happy as truly to
understand Christian annihilation, ecstasies, exolution,
liquefaction, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, gustation of
God, and ingression into the divine shadow, they have already
had an handsome anticipation of heaven; the glory of the world
is surely over, and the earth in ashes unto them.
To subsist in lasting monuments, to live in their productions, to
exist in their names and predicament of chimeras, was large
satisfaction unto old expectations, and made one part of their
Elysiums. But all this is nothing in the metaphysicks of true
belief. To live indeed, is to be again ourselves, which being not
only an hope, but an evidence in noble believers, ’tis all one to
lie in St Innocent’s+ church-yard as in the sands of Egypt.
Ready to be anything, in the ecstasy of being ever, and as

content with six foot as the moles of Adrianus.+
—“Tabesne cadavera solvat,
An rogus, haud refert.“— LUCAN. viii. 809.
+ In Paris, where bodies soon consume.
+ A stately mausoleum or sepulchral pile, built by Adrianus in
Rome, where now standeth the castle of St Angelo.

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