One Generation To Another

It is still there. He drove past it in the spring.

Forty one years ago he was part of making it, and he was young, and it took the best part of two years, and there was a stretch in the middle of it where he thought he had made a serious mistake in his life.

It works. It has worked continuously since. People use it every single day without any awareness whatsoever that it is a made thing, in the way that nobody looks at a road and thinks about the men who put it there.

He is seventy four.

And what he said, sitting on the bench, was not what you would expect. He is not bitter about the anonymity. He says he never expected anything else and that is true.

What he cannot get comfortable with is subtler. It is that the thing has entirely detached from the making. It exists now as a fact about the world, like a hill. Nobody alive who uses it knows it was made, and in about fifteen years there will be nobody alive who knows it was made by anyone in particular, and after that the information will simply not exist anywhere.

He said: it will still be there and it will not have been made.

That is the sentence he has been carrying, and it is a strange one, and it is not self pity. It is closer to a question about what happens to work when the memory of the making runs out.

You may have your own thing that is still there. Something still being used that has quietly stopped having a maker, and a question about that you have never been able to phrase.

The line that keeps it attached

Here is a verse about how things get carried forward, and the mechanism in it is worth noticing.

One generation shall praise thy works to another, and shall declare thy mighty acts.Psalm 145:4

One generation to another. The whole psalm is about God's works being kept in circulation by being told.

Now here is what I want you to see, and it is the thing that answers your sentence.

The praising in that verse is not aimed at keeping the makers in memory. It is aimed at keeping the works attached to God. That is the connection that is being maintained down the generations, and it is not maintained by anybody remembering who did the hands on part.

Which means the attachment you are worried about losing was never held by human memory in the first place.

You are attached to what you made by something that does not run out when people forget. Psalm 145:4 keeps the works joined to God across generations rather than joined to the memory of any maker, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a join that no living person is holding.

Let me say plainly what I am not going to do, because you have a good ear for it and you would hear a dodge immediately.

I am not going to tell you that somebody will find out. In fifteen years the information will not exist and you are right about that and I am not going to soften it.

And I am not going to tell you that your part was more important than it was. You were one man among many on a two year job and you have never claimed otherwise.

You are known as the maker by the only one who was there for the whole of it. The written word passes the works down the generations without depending on any maker being named, and the Holy Spirit was present for two years that nobody now alive remembers.

Here is the honest half, and it is the hardest thing in this. Your sentence is right. It will still be there and it will not have been made, as far as any human record goes. That is genuinely what happens to most work, and it is what has happened to almost every made thing in the world.

What is not true is the part underneath it: that this means the making has stopped existing. The making happened. Two years happened. A young man who thought he had ruined his life happened, and God was in that yard, and none of that requires a person alive in forty years to hold it.

There is a part only you can do and it is small. The thing gets named out loud, once, and handed over. Not to preserve it. To put it where it already was.