The List #54: Lost and Found

Some things remain.

Replica of Trojan Horse—Canakkale Waterfront, Dardanelles. Photo by Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

They say you can find anything online, but it’s not true. Some things are lost—so many things, in fact, that it can make you weep. Ninety-nine percent of pre-Christian literature, by some accounts, and 90% of Aeschylus’ plays alone: gone, gone. It’s like having three plays by Shakespeare, a shred or two of Bach, and then nothing.

“We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms,” says the learned tutor Septimus in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. The rest is silence.

Septimus still won’t despair, though: “what we let fall will be picked up by those behind.” Who knows if he’s right? But sometimes, out of all that darkness, what was lost is found.