remember her by. Among the most
lasting things left now of the girl were
these ceramic tablets, the original one
beginning with Fanny’s irrepressible
salutation: “I wish all people in the
future all the best.”
On one of my last nights with
Martin, we were sitting in the living
room above his little shop, an alpine
rain glazing the window. There were
film-projector lights and cool paint-
ings, ceramic antelope skulls, and
handmade plates and cups. There was
a bookshelf with a little note above it,
entitled ‘The Journey of Things’, urging
a visitor to either leave an object or
take one, then send photographic
proof of the object’s journey. Martin’s
wife, an artist named Masha, came
and went, and his daughter – at 11, the
youngest of five children; he has three
from a previous marriage, and Masha
has one – was in the other room with
a friend watching a movie.
I told Martin that, in a weird way,
the project of trying to memorialise
this moment – to capture the fatuous-
ness, conflict, and despair of it – gave
me more faith than the moment itself.
By leaping your mind to the future,
the assumption of new understand-
ing that comes with the passage of
time could actually reveal itself in the
present moment.
Martin considered this for a
moment and said, “Working for this
project in some aspects probably
helps me to survive. When you see
some developments, you see in a
much wider time scale.”
“Meaning you don’t get as
depressed about it?” I asked.
“Maybe. Sometimes it makes
me more relaxed ... It gives you a
d i st a nc e.”
Minecraft, porn, kitties,Fortnite,
online shopping – this is who we are.
It’s a big selfie, Martin said. His job
wasn’t to censor or edit; it was merely
to record the flow of information on
the ceramic tablets and then hope the
tablets do the talking someday, letting
the future decide who we were, in all
of our contradictions.
For most hours in a day, Martin was
thinking about how to communicate
through time. On some faraway beach
in a faraway future, some unknown
creature might pick up his token, as
the Spaniard once found Martin’s bot-
tle, and given the address contained
on it, find us hidden just beneath the
surface of this planet. All of our woes
and elations will be theirs, then.
“Why not?” asked Martin. “It will
only take one.”Want to nominate your favourite book
as one of the 1000 most inspiring books
ever? Martin Kunze and his team have
set up a website where Reader’s Digest
readers from around the world can
submit suggestions about which books
should be included in this amazing
human history project. To participate in
this history-making project, go to http://www.
memory-of-mankind.com/1000books.FROMGQ(NOVEMBER 2018), © 2018 BY
MICHAEL PATERNITI, W W W.GQ.COM
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The Archivist of Everything