When I made the graphic for this Substack’s emails and About page, the graphics tool required two pieces of information: title and subtitle. Inasmuch as this substack already had a name, the title required no additional effort. The subtitle was a different matter. It required imagination. That text is supposed to hint at what I’m doing or, perhaps more accurately, what I think I’m doing.
After some deliberations, I entered “Writing for a thousand years” as my subtitle. If any words describe my madness, it’s these. Any rational author working within a market of declining readership (and a publishing industry that employs sensitivity readers) would desperately chase literary trends. Such a strategy would provide me with the best chances for good reviews as well as influencers willing to endorse my work. So why can’t I do it, and what does any of this have to do with writing for a thousand years?
There are things in this life we each covet. For me, it’s writing that finds new readers in every generation. This capacity, in theory, should be quite unlikely. As time passes, cultural references disappear. Governments, methods of commerce, technology, language, and attitudes all change. Old books, wisdom supposes, belong to old times. Despite this, we have the below words from a veteran of war who was also a playwright, living over two thousand years before us. His words offer a reflection on the fate of the soldiers who, having died in battle on foreign soil, have only their ashes returned to loved ones.
For Ares the god of Strife,
Who does the swaying scales of battle hold,
War’s money changer, giving dust for gold,
sends back to hearts that held them dear,
scant ash of warriors, wept with many a tear.
Light to the hand, but heavy to the soul,
Indeed, it fills the light urn full
with what survived the flame–
Death’s dusty measure of a hero’s frame.
(Aeschylus, The Oresteia)
It seems that the passage of time has done little to dull the author’s power. Classical Greek drama from this author and others has been used in the healing process for modern veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What better testimony is there for an author’s achievement?
I’m preoccupied with why some writing stays with humanity from century to century. We have Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the list goes on. These deceased refuse to stay buried. Beneath paperbound headstones, they rise.
When I write, I see my task as speaking not only to my own time but to a future when my audience is as far away from the twenty-first century as I am from Troy. In this posterity there will still be readers like us, people hungering for ancient struggles preserving the grief and glory owed their own labors, readers who will raise the cover of an old book like they were tilting a jar to spill out all the stories they themselves have suffered but had to disregard, in memory and spirit, if they were to endure.
I’m writing for a thousand years.
