The Unmarked
My mother’s one request for her funeral is that we recite the passage from the Book of Sirach, which begins “Let us now praise famous men.” This passage is also known for its namesake, James Agee and Walker Evans’s influential photobook documenting tenant farmers in the Great Depression. The beginning, if cut short, may be misread as a celebration of names written in history books, but the full text does just the opposite.
How many things are misread when they are cut short?
Our laws, scriptures, and even our lives…
This passage asks us to make space in our memory for those we will not remember, honoring the unmarked and unnamed. These words are an antidote to my depression, specifically the episodes when I am paralyzed by the thought that my life has contained no meaning.
“And some there be, which have no memorial;
Who are perished as though they had not been,
And are become as though they had not been born;
And their children after them.
But these were men of mercy,
Whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten.
With their seed shall remain continually a good inheritance;”
The world we inhabit was built by and is inherited from the dead. We are born from them, for better and for worse. Our bodies are enmeshed with the nameless and the forgotten who have built our homes, shaped our language, and written our laws. They define our psyches and borders. In The Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison writes, “By passing from the realm of the engendered into that of the engendering, the dead become the authors and proprietors of life, personifying all that transcends and yet at the same time generates human society.” This is the afterlife of the dead, pervasive in all cultures, with which we must reckon and counsel daily. They are people whose names we will never know. When we touch the relics they have left us, we take on their burdens and joys. The ones with no names or memorials live on.
My mother’s one request for her funeral is that we recite the passage from the Book of Sirach, which begins “Let us now praise famous men.” This passage is also known for its namesake, James Agee and Walker Evans’s influential photobook documenting tenant farmers in the Great Depression. The beginning, if cut short, may be misread as a celebration of names written in history books, but the full text does just the opposite.
How many things are misread when they are cut short?
Our laws, scriptures, and even our lives…
This passage asks us to make space in our memory for those we will not remember, honoring the unmarked and unnamed. These words are an antidote to my depression, specifically the episodes when I am paralyzed by the thought that my life has contained no meaning.
“And some there be, which have no memorial;
Who are perished as though they had not been,
And are become as though they had not been born;
And their children after them.
But these were men of mercy,
Whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten.
With their seed shall remain continually a good inheritance;”
The world we inhabit was built by and is inherited from the dead. We are born from them, for better and for worse. Our bodies are enmeshed with the nameless and the forgotten who have built our homes, shaped our language, and written our laws. They define our psyches and borders. In The Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison writes, “By passing from the realm of the engendered into that of the engendering, the dead become the authors and proprietors of life, personifying all that transcends and yet at the same time generates human society.” This is the afterlife of the dead, pervasive in all cultures, with which we must reckon and counsel daily. They are people whose names we will never know. When we touch the relics they have left us, we take on their burdens and joys. The ones with no names or memorials live on.
Ecclesiasticus 44:1, 9-11
Harrison, Robert Pogue. The Dominion of the Dead. United Kingdom: University of Chicago Press, 2010.