The Brooklyn Rail

Among other things, Bob writes that “the future is looking rather grim.” To me it doesn’t look like anything at all. Maybe that’s somewhere near the rub: that the present is so expressive yet thick that we can only imagine future consciousnesses failing to make handy representations of it. What will future people do with the lumpy, turbid batter of our time?! Maybe let’s start by seeing to it they have a time of their own. One thing to do towards that end would be to get out of their way.

I have to say, anxiety about the Great Sorting gives me far more anxiety than the prospect that my personal passions, or what I construe as the representative passions of the “contemporary,” won’t survive the Sorting. It makes me think Kafka was right that impatience was our original sin, a cudgel against intolerable, unpreventable ignorance. Nothing can close the gap between what we are and what the Sorting will make and remake of us. What maybe hurts, is realizing that. What maybe hurts, is having all this infrastructure and ability and still having to be historical, to exist in the context of eternity—which is famously unresponsive to representation.

I mean, if you want, there’s a “we” who’ll know. Who’ll know what matters most and what we can chuck. Who’ll decide what we carried, what we tried, what we extinguished. That would be the real-historical “we” that excludes us as absolutely as it includes us. We won’t get the memo. Anyway, the aches it would cause won’t be the ones that trouble people by the time the need to know arises again. Think of it as one less email. Is that really so grim?