A man's real possession

"Memory," the poet Alexander Smith wrote in 1863, is "a man's real possession… In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor." The title of the particular essay this comes from is "Death and Dying," and memory certainly can be a sobering topic. Even in 2007, for all the wonders of technology, it remains an absolute limit: the history that living eyes have seen creeps behind us, reaching back only a century or fractionally more. The title of world's oldest human has, since 13th August 2007, been held by 114-year-old Edna Parker of Indiana, born on 20th April 1893: no human being now alive saw the year 1892.

Consider Henry Allingham, who at 111 is the oldest of the 23 veterans of the first world war still alive today, and one of only 3 British veterans living. Within a few years, this epochal event will have passed from living memory; the government announced in June last year that the death of the last known British first world war veteran would be marked by a national memorial service at Westminster Abbey. It's a slightly macabre thought, and also begs the question—what else should we be commemorating? It can be surprising how long, and how, the past lingers. In 1869, the last surviving veteran of the Revolutionary War which founded the United States died. In 1956, the last surviving member of the Union Army which fought in the American Civil War died. It was as recently as 1993 that the last surviving veteran of the Boer War died.

In one sense, this is all incredibly banal. Only a tiny slice of history can ever "live" in memory, while every experience comes only once. In another sense, however, anything that puts history and mortality into fresh perspective has its value—and it is worth being reminded that talking to a living person about events they have witnessed is a privilege that time constantly revokes.