A Journey to the End of the Millennium

But will there be anyone to remember us in another thousand years? Will that ancient soul, in whose moist, private womb flickers the transient shadow of our deeds and dreams, still exist then? Whatever it is called, lacking internal organs, crammed full of computerized liquids, miniaturized in wisdom and happiness, will it still feel the urge or the longing to travel back a thousand years and look for us, as you are looking for your heroes now? But will it be possible to find anything at all? Surely a thousand years then will be like thousands of years now. Who knows whether in a thousand years’ time clear, concrete understanding will not have removed its responsibility for our abstruse and muddled history, just as we have got rid of the “history” of the cavemen? Still, surely we won’t just be forgotten like that. Surely it’s not possible that not a single molecule of memory will be found for us, like a yellowing manuscript at the bottom of a forgotten drawer, whose very cataloguing guarantees its eternity even if not a single reader ever discovers it. But will the catalogue itself survive? Or will some totally different cipher fuse and scramble everything that has gone, so that our image can never again be intertwined as we imagine it to ourselves?