Michael Bywater - Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost, & Where Did it Go?

From one loser to another: goodbye.

Brace ourselves against it as we will (with manners, customs, beliefs, riches, vocations, pastimes, love and learning), we will all lose in the end. What will we lose to?

We will lose to the law. And if you dont believe me, to hell with you.

And to hell with me, too. For if hell is as it is in at least one cosmology a region of ice and silence, we are all going there and theres nothing we can do about it.

Caprice? No, its as far from caprice as one can get. Its physics. And physics says weve had it. You, me, the dog, the careful home, the plans, the savings, the posterity, the great globe itself, Yea, and all which it inherit: the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Thats the one which governs us. Simply but clumsily put, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says heat doesnt go uphill. More clearly expressed, it says: things are getting more chaotic. Order is moving ineluctably towards disorder. The cosmos began in chaos (says Genesis) and (says physics) in chaos it will end. All the energy in everything that is the energy which keeps us going, keeps our cells together, keeps the circling planets spinning on their way, all of it will end up as a sort of formless heat, without order or purpose. The Heat Death of the Universe.

Entropy, the physicists call it. The amount of disorder in a system. And it goes up. Entropy keeps rising. We may cheat it for a few decades (eating and eating and eating to get new energy in, to fuel the struggle against our own bodily chaos) but in the long run, like the Universal casino, entropy will triumph. The House will always win.

Weve had it.

So what do we do while were waiting? Perhaps its a miracle that we do anything at all; the psychoanalyst Gyllian Moore once said that ninety per cent of her work was helping people come to terms with the inevitability of their own death. Most of us, though, manage to rub along, after a fashion; but much of what we do is building defences against loss. Businessmen cope with it by constantly wanting more; the great middle class copes by worrying about how to hang on to what it already has; engineers build things to outlast them; historians stare the thing in the face; artists (of whatever sort) try to stop time and freeze it in its tracks eternal happiness. Most explicitly of all, doctors are engaged in nothing more than keeping loss (of capability, of the faculties, of life itself) at bay.

Yet we understand little about the quiet storm of loss which blows about our lives and histories. Despite the obsession of our species with organizing, categorizing and making lists (we categorize everything, from Linnaean taxonomy to the rules of harmony and counterpoint, from the codifying of human weakness in the form of the law to codifying ourselves both from the top down, in theology, and the bottom up, in the Human Genome Project) we have not managed to organize our thinking about loss. It still just happens. It still surrounds us, dogs our footsteps, clings to our coat-tails and (as P. G. Wodehouse said of Fate) waits around every corner with a sock full of wet sand.

Its everywhere we look. Hydraulic power beneath the streets of London, the graveyard of lost books in the Geniza of Cairo, the lost world of Xanadu, the lost delights of impotency.

The list could go on and on, and, very shortly, will. And the fact that the most difficult thing about writing on loss is knowing when to stop might also be the reason we have never managed to come up with a taxonomy of loss.

Its not for want of trying. We could construct endless taxonomies of loss, and indeed I did so at one stage, thinking there might be a key to it all.

A Taxonomy of Loss, I wrote, then put my foot down and let it rip.

Abandoned

Blown up

Bowdlerized

Burned

Cast in Resin & Sold in Museum Shops

Damnatio Memoriae, Subjected to

Decay, Natural

See also:

Universe, The, Heat Death of Entropy

Destroyed by Mistake

Destroyed by Time

Destroyed by the Author

Destroyed by the Daily Mail

Destroyed by the Forces of Morality

Destroyed in Time of War

Destroyed in Time of Conquest

Destroyed in Time of Defeat

Died

Killed

Murdered

Disintegrated

Drowned

Eaten

Evaporated

Forbidden

By Doctors

By Doctors, but Rehabilitated

By God

By God, but Largely Ignored

Ignorance, Overtaken by the Advancement of

Inadequately Reassembled

Intervention, Divine, Rendered Inaccessible by

Intervention, Diabolical, Rendered Inaccessible by

Intervention, Divine, Inexplicably Withheld

Spirited away (see Jesus)

Should Have Been Lost but Werent

Magicked away

Left

By Mistake

On Purpose