... and it was also only in that era as well with the invention of the gramophone that it became possible for anyone’s voice at all, no matter how eminent, to be recorded and heard after their death. The earlier privilege of remaining uncaptured, of dying with one’s death, was lost. Should the dead move around us like those who haven’t died? Should their presence be more material than those one sees in dreams?
Related Quotes
You must struggle to truly remember this past in all its nuance, error, and humanity. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance - no matter how improved - as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children.
Word got out and what people said was that Dad had been a person of such saintly character that his body had to remain uncorrupted. I was just a kid when he died and nearly my whole life I’ve been hearing everyone say what a good person he was. But to see him emerge that day shifted my thinking. It was as if his early death had been a metaphysical error. It was as if his body was refusing the fate that befell him, as if this whole time he had been awaiting a fairer judgment.
Slavery is so abhorrent that, before getting to grips with the historical scholarship on the topic, I assumed that abolition must have been inevitable. But now I’m not at all sure. Though it’s impossible to know for certain, it’s entirely plausible to me that, were the tape of history rerun a hundred times with slightly different starting conditions, in a significant proportion of those reruns, there would still be legal slavery in many or most countries in the world, even at today’s level of technological development.
That changes when you leave with a story that’s good enough to put you back in the moment, as if you were living it all over again. That’s why we took the Legends so seriously. If people were coming to us to add to their collection of experiences, then we saw these not as extra flourishes but as a responsibility: to give people a memory so good it enabled them to relive their experience with us.
The true gift, then, wasn’t the street hot dog or the bag full of candy bars; it was the story that made a Legend a legend.
To bear the lack of originality: even the least ambitious among us have to invent some way to believe we are distinctive and irreplaceable. One wonders if this desire, humble and presumptuous though innately human, gives the permission for the use of I. Yet for months after the hospital stays I tried to explain to those around me that anyone can be, and should be, replaceable. What does this I matter to you when it means so little to myself?