New Philosopher – July 2019

64

Eternity projects NewPhilosopher

Illustration by Aida Novoa and Carlos Egan

When the British Museum in

London was in the process of acquir-

ing its spectacular wave-form roof in

the late 1990s, I contemplated do-

nating a single triangular pane to sit

among some 3,000 other non-iden-

tical panes making up the Museum’s

iconic ceiling. I was tickled that my

name would be engraved on a singu-

lar piece of strengthened glass and

that all it would cost to bind myself

into the fabric of this magnificent

building was a couple of hundred

pounds – the price of a pair of Eu-

rostar tickets or a splash-out family

meal. What motivated me was a feel-

ing that I wanted to give something

back to the old British Library, with

its cartwheel seating and sky-blue

leather chairs, where I spent many a

year reading and researching.

I wonder now if my motives mir-

rored, on a small scale, those that drive

wealthy philanthropists to donate en-

tire buildings to the public, buildings

which then (quite naturally) get named

for them: the Sainsbury’s Wing, or

the Sackler Gallery, or the Clore? The

cynic in me thinks that philanthropists

have more practical matters in view.

Tax breaks, for one; brand ubiquity, for

another. But if vanity doesn’t also play

some small part in things, what about

posterity – that tangible afterlife that

one acquires not in heaven but here

on Earth by having oneself, or one’s

family name, commemorated in bricks

and mortar? And if the buildings don’t

survive, then surely the history books

will remember.

Certainly there is comfort in the

idea of securing posterity, of being able

to swim in the stream of later genera-

tions – to linger among distant suc-

cessors and become a kind of uniquely

present ancestor. This is the dream of

immortality re-cast in a material light,

a means of extending (literally) the es-

sence of oneself post-death without

actually being physically manifest. It is

about posterity as duration, not tran-

scendence. But in a secular world, who

would quibble with that?

Yet, as someone who writes books

that will certainly outlast me, not least

carry my thoughts and words to peo-

ple I will never meet, I can honestly

say that posterity is not something I

actively seek. My afterlife, such as it

is, will instead be a by-product of my

putting something into the world that

I felt motived to undertake for urgent

and proximate reasons that have eve-

rything to say to the vital present. It

doesn’t excite me particularly to think

by Mariana Benjamin Eternity projects