I still can’t believe I got to study abroad twice in college: first for a semester in Cape Town, and later, for a summer program in Rome. Towards the end of my time in South Africa, I heard a question that stopped me in my tracks:
“If you couldn’t take any pictures, would you still go?”
This question has stuck with me for nearly two years. It echoes in this post like it echoes in my head. My generation grew up with digital footprints. Our data is not our own. Our legacies are depersonalized, encoded, recorded with or without our consent. Privacy is a privilege from a bygone era; we all live online now. Bash Instagram all you like. My generation shares our humanity through visual narratives. We hang on to this endangered thread of freedom to present our stories ourselves, as we choose to tell them.
Digital media is everywhere. Our images are constantly being captured, whether or not we know it. The opportunity to take our own pictures, and to record our own narratives, is precious.
“If you couldn’t take any pictures, would you still go?”
How would I change my behavior if the memory was, quite literally, limited to my own memory?
I am not a photographer. My social media skills are solidly mediocre. I’m not too invested in my “brand.” I don’t really take pictures for the enjoyment of others.
Still, I do take pictures. I am perpetually attempting the impossible, hoping to preserve beauty and wonder for later marvels. I constantly try to stick time in a bottle, so I can share the magic of the moment with one person in particular.
I’m always trying to capture memories like a Romantic poet, for my mom. She sees beauty like I do.
“If you couldn’t take any pictures, would you still go?”
Wordsworth didn’t need a camera break our hearts. With love and language, Keats made a Grecian urn live forever. If I couldn’t take pictures, whatever; I wouldn’t mind. I would absolutely still go.
But what if I couldn’t reach my mom? What if my texts and calls and postcards were “returned to sender?” I’m not sure if I would still want to see like a Romantic.
Mary Shelley published The Last Man in 1826, long before this era of Instagram, a smartphone in every human hand, and of course, COVID-19. Shelley wrote through her newly-widowed grief. She mourned her husband, the late, great Romantic poet Percy Shelley; and fought with her father-in-law over posthumous legacies. She outlived her lover. So did his art.
“If you couldn’t take any pictures, would you still go?”
Lionel Verney, the proverbial LAST MAN, endures this question without reprieve. He haunts a post-human world. The story is a paradox of immortal mortality, for all beings must die; and mortal immortality, through the potential for our creations to live forever. Lionel is all too aware that his own memory is the very last of its kind. He had no camera to pack (Shelley’s late-21st century futuristic setting did not necessarily predict the rise of big tech), nothing to take photographs with, and tragically, a complete lack of pen pals on the same planet.
Who do you write home to, after the fall of humanity? What is left to say when you are legitimately alone in the world?
To commemorate Lionel’s lonely pilgrimage, I created some morbid, vintage-style postcards. Even if snail mail could delightfully and miraculously become an autonomous postal service with carrier-gastropods in such a land after time, retro tourism would still be utterly depressing. It could take years, but Lionel’s post would always come back, returned to sender.
The idea popped into my head the other day, and it just was too devastating to ignore. A “wish you were here” series for the every man. The only man? Oh.
At the end of The Last Man, Lionel explores the final frontier on the colonial empire of mankind. There is nothing left to conquer. Empire fell, once and for all. A select few did survive the plague, but even they could not escape their mortality.
Lionel pilgrimages to Rome, returning to the home of Western Civilization.
“Every part of Rome is replete with relics of ancient times” (Shelley, 461).
Rome is the perfect place to lose your mind. The Eternal City is always lovely, regardless of crowd size.
What a symbolic place to reflect upon the entire rise and fall of the West. What an epic spot to find solace in some of the most beautiful and glorious creations known to man. What a sanctuary to appreciate art, for art’s sake. Everything else in our world is fleeting. Art and beauty keep living.
Rome is also the perfect place to find yourself again. I would know.
“At length, then, I found a consolation. I had not vainly sought the storied precincts of Rome- I had discovered a medicine for my many and vital wounds” (Shelley, 462).
