On The Importance of Continuity.

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I can't remember if it was James Burke's “Connections” or Jonathon Miller's “The Body in Question” but one of the two addressed permanence and the 2 principle ways to make it.  You can either make it hard, or make it renewable.  The comparison examples are a statue and a fountain.  The statue requires an immense investment in energy up front to form a material so resistant to erosion that it will last satisfactorily long.  In the end, though, entropy always wins, as one can see in really old graveyards: the tombstones are smoothed to the point where we have no idea who was buried there.

The second case is the interesting one, the fountain.  Here, the investment is in a system that doesn't resist entropy at all, but continually renews.  We get into a serious Ship of Theseus question here, but let's just accept that second-by-second, the fountain renews the form of the creator.  In this case, there's a constant, low-level investment in the ever-renewing form.

And, in watching some birds milling in the distance this evening while pondering the presence of our first grand-infant at our wedding, the importance of continuity came to mind.  It is not in human nature to think this way, but nothing is permanent.  We all will die, the earth will be vaporized by the sun, the universe will die it's heat-death.  Water erodes the mightiest stone, the greatest river can have it's course changed in seconds. The point there is that this thing we call “the world” is an example of the fountain-school of permanence, it's constantly renewing.  So we humans place an emphasis on continuity.  And for said grand-infant to be told, say, in her teen-hood that “I remember when you were at our wedding” by her wizened grandparents will be one of those things that kids nod and smile and forget almost as quickly as the batty grandparents.

And yet, we don't.  I was told that, as a baby, I'd sat in the laps of my great grandfather (for whom I'm named) and (dubiously) Buckminster Fuller.  I discount the latter as one of those myths, but I consider the former as if it had some significance.  Just as, I hope someday, my daughter considers that (and there's a photo of the event) the time she was held by her paternal great grandmother while her mom looked on.  That both of those women are now dead, she's the carrier-on of the continuity.  We hand the baton, however ephemeral, and smile as it's carried on away from us.

Photos, and the interwebs, have changed a lot of things, but we continue to marvel at the preservation of the experiences.  It's funny what goes forward, and how much it's changed but that memes, trends, and cutler over all comes forward, well, that's the upside of getting old is wondering at all the non-changes in the novelty.

We are each of us carriers of continuity, and that's kinda cool.