Isn’t this a good time for a cheerfully post-apocalyptic novel?
There is a scene from such a novel I think about frequently, and have done so for decades—the scene in Walter M Miller’s excellent sci fi classic, A Canticle For Leibowitz, where the guileless Br Francis finally makes his way to New Rome to deliver a precious relic of his order’s founder to the pope.
The “relic” is a fragment of an electrical engineer’s blueprint for a “transistorised control system,” an artefact from so long in the past of this post-apocalyptic, mostly post-literate world, that no one knows what kind of information it is, much less what it was for.
They do know it was made by the hand of someone they consider a martyred saint, and the order’s entire charism is to preserve knowledge in a hostile world; so Br Francis has spent the last many years lovingly and laboriously transcribing the mysterious blueprint into a highly decorated illuminated manuscript.
But on his way to New Rome, he is waylaid by bandits, who assume the beautiful piece is actually the main treasure Francis wanted to guard, and they steal it. They leave him the original blueprint, though, which he presents to the pope. The pope thanks him and then says that he heard the copy was beautiful. Francis responds:
“It was nothing, Holy Father. I only regret that I wasted 15 years.”
The way I remember it, the pope responds that it was not wasted, because it was done in love, and that he can offer that up to God. But I looked it up, and that’s not quite what the pope says. He said:
“Wasted? How ‘wasted’? If the robber had not been misled by the beauty of your commemoration, he might have taken this, might he not?”
The pope asks Francis if he knows what the relic means, and then admits that he doesn’t, either. He then reverences it and says:
“We thank you from the bottom of our heart for those 15 years, beloved son,” he added to Br Francis. “Those years were spent to preserve this original. Never think of them as wasted. Offer them to God. Someday the meaning of the original may be discovered, and may prove important.”
Two of the overarching themes of the book are that knowledge is worth preserving . . . and that man inevitably uses knowledge to destroy himself. This happens repeatedly in the book, which is divided into three parts, each recounting a different era.
The book is not anti-intellectual, by any means, but it does ask you to question the value of human progress, when progress apparently inevitably leads to apocalypse.
The pope thought Francis’ effort was not in vain because it helped save the original manuscript, which may someday aid the whole world. But is that really the reason it was worthwhile?
Many things can be true at the same time. A thing can have value because of what it is; a thing can have value because it may come in handy someday; and a thing can also have value because it was made with love. That alone can make it worth preserving.
I can’t help thinking of the Tumblr post that says:
“Man the crazy thing about babies is that like, some people would think that reading a baby a book about farm animals is teaching them about farm animals, but really it’s teaching them about the concept of a book and how there’s new information on each page of a single object, but really, beyond that, it’s teaching them how language works, and beyond that it’s really actually teaching them about human interaction, and really really it’s them learning about existing in a three-dimensional space and how they can navigate that space, but actually, above all, it is teaching them that mama loves them.”
Anything good, including knowledge, can be distorted and used to harm, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth preserving; and not everything has to be used for some practical good in order to be called precious.
This is something good to remember when we find ourselves in the midst of what feels like an irremediable pattern of humans hurting humans.
It’s still always worthwhile turning to the preservation of knowledge, most especially when we recognise that preservation as an act of love, and not merely of utility.
What do you know? What do you know how to do? What can you teach? What can you explain? What can you preserve and pass along, even if you don’t completely understand it, just because you love it, offering it up to God to use as he sees fit?
Maybe the thing you preserve is something from your past, or something from the past of your ancestors. Maybe it’s just the ability to act with love. That’s become something of a relic, lately. Little understood, valued by few. Still worth preserving, even if we aren’t sure what may come of it.
We don’t know what will come next, or what will survive after the next inevitable deluge. We do know that God gave us a love of knowledge, and the love of passing it along, for a reason. And we do know that God loves us.
That’s what the story of our lives, like the book read by mama, really teaches us: That God loves us. The specifics are less important. Time spent in giving that love back—to God, to each other, it makes little difference—is never time wasted.