"Of what value is the growth of a body of wisdom that life and learning have achieved in us? All the fertile pockets of experience translated into words and images and letters and messages, each longing for some kind of permanence — the preservation of emotion and illumination in a discrete expression that holds it up to view in its own clear cell of a written form?
"I keep a reflective journal. I write poems and essays that attempt to capture and hold on to insight and experience. I take photographs to keep memories alive and to refine and express my sense of beauty and design. Everyone now has a point-and-shoot camera or a smartphone that can snap and save an image. Now there are so many trillions of such images that when we're gone, who'll care?
"I'll be beyond caring! In my attic hundreds of carousels of slides have lain waiting to be viewed, images of our entire family growth over sixty years. My family says they'd love to see them on the screen, but who has a projector anymore? My brother is endeavoring to transfer them all onto CDs for us. But is anyone really interested in looking at them? It will be ancient history and obsolete technology, likely to be relegated to the trash heap, the burn pile of trivialities.
"What about all the challenges I've taken up and succeeded at? The risks I've taken? The failures I've learned from? Is that set down in that record book in heaven for safekeeping? Have I accomplished anything of lasting worth? Even more intimately delicate is the question, does it really matter what anybody thinks about me or my work?
"What is the meaning and value of an insight gained, of a perception captured, along with perhaps some grains of wisdom? Even if it has been shared with kindred spirits, might it not evaporate in a swirl of someone else's forgetfulness and the swift passage of time?
"What lasts, even for a lifetime? Is anything permanent? Books and magazines are being digitized, but with the rapid progress of technology much will become obsolete with time. Memory can become a prism through which to view the colorful events and accumulations of a long life. But what if the prism is shattered? What if the light is snuffed out like a candle flame? Is anything left but a dead wick?"
