Changing Big Questions means changing our Off Paper image, and for our new question of How Are We Remembered?, we have selected an Off Paper image that is a little tongue in cheek: the warehouse scene from the ending of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Although we are half-kidding in our choice of image, there is some truth to the fact that every adventure, regardless of how epic it may have been, ends with the question of storage. All of Indiana’s over the top trials and tribulations– the submarines! the explosions! the Germans! the snakes!– are ultimately reduced to a forgotten artifact in a forgotten crate in a forgotten warehouse. And we don’t even have a decent image of that warehouse– just a grainy film still.
Isn’t this how remembrance ineluctably goes? It’s like TS Eliot said in Hollow Men: “This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang but a whimper.” Our experiences are only as enduring as our ability to document them, and the passions of our personal investments are reduced to piles of papers shoved in a box, to digital files on rapidly-obsolescing storage systems (floppy disks, anyone?). The themes of memory and documentation are nuanced and complex, and we look forward to sharing the questions that arise as we ask How Are We Remembered?