Slight setbacks may have disproportionate effects upon one’s mood, and despair may be induced by trivia. For example, the other day I lost the key to my post-box somewhere between the latter and the house, 500 yards away. The track is somewhat overgrown, and despite several prolonged searches, I could not find the key. Even on the very small scale of my own life, this was no tragedy, but the inconvenience of it—having to buy and install a new post-box—nevertheless made me wonder whether it (that is to say, life) was all worth it.
There was one small consolation during my tedious searches, however, namely that I found another fossil ammonite by the side of the track. I have found about a hundred such fossils on my land, but none of trilobites, from which I conclude, no doubt crudely, that these fossils of mine are between 66 and 250 million years old, ammonites having gone extinct 66 million years ago and trilobites 250 million years ago.
The ammonites were cephalopods, related to the present-day nautilus, and there were thousands of species of them during their long sojourn in the oceans. The trilobites (even more species of them) were arthropods, related to the present-day horseshoe crab.
The ammonites and trilobites coexisted for millions of years, though not necessarily peacefully, the larger types of the former being inclined to eat the smaller types of the latter. I confess that, whenever I think of ammonites and trilobites (which is not often), I think of them as two tribes in the Old Testament. The Ammonites were indeed a tribe in the Bible, not well spoken of although (or perhaps because) they were closely related to the Israelites, with whom they were often in conflict.
Since the trilobites went extinct before the ammonites, a ridiculous phrase runs through my mind: The ammonites rose up and smote the trilobites. This biblical-sounding genocide never took place, the trilobites, unlike the ammonites, not surviving the Permian-Triassic mass extinction caused not by genocide but by volcanic activity—or perhaps I should say, overactivity. The cephalopods, it seems, were more adaptable.
Even if the fossil I found were only the most recent of its type, that is to say 66,000,000 years old, it was enough to hold such evidence in my hand to cause me to reflect on the disjunction between the ridiculous strength of my emotions and the fleetingness of my existence. It seems unlikely that mankind will last as long as the ammonites, that is to say 300,000,000 years, certainly not the way we are going on; and it is a sobering, if useless, thought that the life of a man is one eighth as long in years as 300,000,000 is in minutes.
I returned from a fruitless third search for the keys to my post-box very frustrated. When one loses something, failure to find it seems almost a moral failure, for it is there somewhere to be found, if only one looked hard enough. Therefore, not to have found it is the result of insufficient effort. And whenever this situation arises, I think of, and adapt slightly, Bishop Butler’s great (though seemingly banal) metaphysical principle, that everything is what it is and not another thing. I change this while I am searching to, “Everything is where it is, and not anywhere else.” It is there to be found; it is just that I have not found it.
When frustrated, I retire to my library and leaf through a few books: But the thought occurs to me that, in this, I am almost as much a fossil as the ammonite itself. Only that same day, I had read an article in a newspaper (itself a medium in the process of fossilization) that the habit of reading has declined yet further, in children by 50 percent since 2016 alone, by which time it was already not a favorite pastime.
As for books, they are decreasingly necessary in people’s lives—but not in mine, on the contrary. Now that I am retired, I live mainly in or through books, which are, so to speak, in dialectical relationship with my past life. I suppose this cannot be the case for much younger people who have not yet had a wide enough experience of life that almost every book, no matter how seemingly recondite, has some personal meaning for them. But by the time they reach my age, books will have gone the way of trilobites and ammonites. I, also, will have gone that way, having lived the last years of my life like a dinosaur just before the Great Extinction, or perhaps like the last thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, that was filmed in 1936 in Hobart zoo, the last of his species that was, with his death, about to go extinct: the difference being that, unlike the thylacine, I know that my species, that of the bibliomane, is about to go extinct.
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Of course, there are compensations to being a living fossil. At least you are not of the common herd and are therefore able secretly, in the recesses of your heart, to feel superior to it. Reading books is not just pleasurable, but mentally elevating; I cannot remember having read a book in the last decade that taught me nothing, even if only about the time in which it was written. Not even the pulpiest of pulp novels is completely without instruction.
But are books necessary to moral development? We may dismiss their sufficiency in this regard straight away; no one would expect the person who had read 100 books to be necessarily twice as good, or even only slightly better, than someone who has read 50. Indeed, reading the wrong books can probably make you worse than you would otherwise have been; nor does it follow from the fact that books can make you worse that they must also be able to make you better. It is easier to corrupt than to correct.
So, why do I lament the decline of reading, especially of books? I can say that it is because I think it will render people more superficial, less informed, and even less intelligent, that it represents a thinning out of our culture. But really it is because I don’t want to think that, whatever its snobbish consolations, I have been engaged throughout the last half century in self-fossilization.
