Memento mori

I went to the Wellcome Collection’s exhibition of London skeletons, mostly found during rebuilding and renovation works, on Euston Road. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s a rather sobering experience. Nearly two thousand years of life and death in the capital are displayed, from the probably overweight, bon-vivant William Wood (84) to an unborn child, its bones still lying within its mother even after death.

The bones tell us a remarkable amount about the lives of past Londoners. The scars left on the bones show lives of excess, through gout and arthritis, to lives of want and disease, through syphilis and rickets. Even the place of burial indicates social status, with the rich buried in Chelsea while the residents of the workhouse and the prison might have had their eternal repose in St Bride’s Lower Churchard. I wonder what tales are being told, not to be read perhaps for centuries until our bodies are dug up for some future building works, in our bones. Will future visitors wonder at the inequities and injustices of our time and decry the situation that allowed such differences between rich and poor as we now look back?

On the subject of the transience of human life, I’ve recently read a remarkable book called Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon that deals with the future evolution of homo sapiens, through eighteen distinct, future species. It is remarkable both for the timespan it covers – two billion years – and for illustrating, despite all the advances we may make, that homo sapiens is a product of its evolution and that its end, although it may be delayed through skill and cunning, is inevitable. The ultimate message, in all this futility, is that ‘the good life’, if I may mix my metaphors, is in the searching for, but not the finding of, the Grail.

Respice post te! Hominem te esse memento!
– Look behind you! Remember that you are but a man!
Warning traditionally read by a slave to a victorious Roman general at his Triumphal march.

xD.