Future generations can learn from documents written for the present
By Lethbridge Herald on December 13, 2024.
Dan O’Donnell
The movie, The Conclave, starring Ralph Fiennes, takes place in the Vatican after the death of a pope. The character played by Fiennes, Cardinal Lawrence, is Dean of the Conclave, meaning the person responsible for organising the vote for the pope’s successor.
I’m a big fan of what you might call Vatican movies. I loved The Two Popes, didn’t mind Angels and Demons (despite hating the book), and really enjoyed the Name of the Rose, which, while less a movie about the Vatican than cloisters, nevertheless counts as far as I am concerned.
The problem facing Fiennes’s character in The Conclave is to ensure the integrity of the consultations as the Cardinals go through multiple rounds of voting. As you might expect in any gathering of ambitious managers, a lot of hidden baggage arrives with those Princes of the Church: sex scandals, influence peddling, and enough back-stabbing and character-assasination to make even Richard Hatch, the famous villain from the first season of Survivor, blush.
At one point, while trying to figure out whether one of the Cardinals is still eligible to be an elector, Cardinal Lawrence breaks into the sealed bedroom of the previous pope. He goes through the pope’s chest of drawers, rifles his desk, and flips through various books on his table. What he is looking for is some kind of document describing what happened at the pope’s final meeting, held a few hours before he died.
I won’t tell you what Fiennes’s character found, so as not to spoil the movie for you. But as I was watching it, I confess that I was less interested in the information he was looking for than the fact that he thought he could find it. That Cardinal Lawrence thought that something the deceased pope might have written could tell him something about the end of his life. Looking for communication, in other words, from beyond the grave.
The idea that a character in a movie or novel leaves behind a message for others to follow in the event of his or her death is, of course, a commonplace. People facing threats from evil corporations or government spies record videos or audio that — inevitably, it seems — begin “if you are watching (or listening) to this, then I must be dead….” Characters who kill themselves — or did they? — leave behind suicide notes or (again) video or audio. And detectives go through the diaries of murder victims, hoping to discover some clue as to what happened.
This plot device is so common, in fact, that I’m not sure we really pay attention to how impressive it is. That we, as human beings, can have contact with others — share our thoughts and feelings, and, of course, guesses about who murdered us — after we are dead.
The technology we do this through is more 5,000 years old (even those videos and cassette tapes are usually scripted — with scripts made through writing). And while the fact that we can use this technology to communicate with future generations is impressive, it is, to my mind, even more impressive how much future generations can learn from the documents that were not written for those who come after: the notes, receipts, letters, and, nowadays emails and webpages, that we write to communicate with each other, while we are still alive.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) reminiscing in his later years about the French Revolution “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive/ But to be young was very heaven.” Chaucer (approx. 1343-1400) complaining to his secretary Adam about the poor quality of his copying.
The letters of Margaret Paston to her husband John describing the various travails, difficulties, and joys of their working Norfolk estate in the mid-1400s. While some of these were written with at least a half-eye to the future, their main audiences were people who were alive back then. Who were concerned about eighteenth-century politics, or knew the price of grain in the 1400s.
As a medievalist, I find returning to these glimpses of the past to be immensely satisfying — centering even. Whenever you feel the pressure of today, it is lovely to turn back to see that it was ever thus. That, as Chaucer — echoing Hippocrates — once said, “The life so short, the craft so long to learn.”
13-12
So true! Thanks for this, I enjoyed reading it!