Preservation is about distributing the burden of representation between present and future. It means keeping the faith that the signal we send down the conductor of history, while destined to weaken like Socrates’ magnetic rings in the story of Ion, will one day be amplified by a later age. The Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf survives in one badly damaged eleventh-century manuscript. Buffeted by time and circumstance, burned by fire, flung from a window, corroded by mildew, overwritten and erased, the manuscript was brought to the brink of death countless times before being virtually restored through advanced image processing and 3D computer modeling over the course of the last two decades. “Posterity has a brisk way with manuscripts,” deadpans Tom Stoppards’ Housman in The Invention of Love. Indeed, but it also has a restorative way. Enlightened preservation strategy, as the material fortunes of the Beowulf ms. so eloquently teach us, is about envisaging posterity’s share.
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Preservation courts moderate loss as a hedge against total extinctive loss.
Posted by karik at November 1, 2003 9:56 PM | TrackBack