in 2010, BBC Radio 4 and the British Museum launched a 100-part radio series, also available as a podcast, narrated by then-museum director Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects, followed later by a book with the same title.
what made this fascinating was the herculean effort to tell our story through a humanity-sized handful of tangible objects meant to represent 2 million years of human history.
encapsulating my own life in a single object isn’t nearly as hard. if all roads lead to Rome, then everything that makes up me can be rounded up rather neatly in one word: the page.
had I been born to a different century, it’s paper I’d have singled out. or, if we were to go back far enough, silk sheets, palm leaves, vellum, bamboo strips, papyrus, clay tablets, or stone, metal, or bone. but alive am I during the silicon age, so the “page” takes on a meaning beyond just a particular kind of writing material, extending down to the level of software and apps.
the page is the anchor that contains my life in the chaotic sea of being alive; it’s the atom that forms the building blocks giving meaning to my existence.
Emily Rapp Black asks in I Would Die If I Were You: Notes on Art and Truth-Telling:
“Why beaver away at a writing project that may never see the light of day? There are so many ways to spend our limited time on this earth (many of which are far more lucrative and comfortable and less time-consuming than making art), so why write a book or a song, why paint or create anything at all? Why be curious about your patterns of thought, and about the epistemological compass that guides you, a.k.a. what you know and how you think you know it and what you do with what you know or think you know?”
we live in a time where the screen has all but replaced the page. by ‘screen’ here, I mean the endless feed we consume; by ‘page’, a space we actively engage with, on paper or on screen. whereas the page leaves room for us—whether as an empty space for us to create from, or as the written word that asks us to engage our mind’s eye to add mental images to someone else’s creation or add our own opinion to those jotted down by another person—the screen requires little more than passive consumption.
the page asks us what we think; the screen tells us what to think. the page is an invitation to wrestle with the gnarliness of being human, especially now, when wicked problems appear to grow abundantly like wild weeds in a supposedly tended garden. but the page, which connects us to our ancestors across all recorded time, tells us also that we’re not the first to feel this way; that chaos has always reigned, and we’ve always struggled with the question of how to make sense of what is in light of what we think can or should be.
the screen shows us what the world is like now, as if humanity has gone down a path of no return. it offers fleeting entertainment as a ‘solution’ to the despair of seeing what our species is capable of. the page invites us to look into the past, or to imagine a different tomorrow. it reminds us that anything is possible at all times; that our heroes of old faced the same fatalistic grappling our heroes of tomorrow—ourselves, even—encounter at the precipice of answering the hero’s call to journey across the page and make sense of it all. that if they could do it, survive it, make the most or the best or even just a something from it, then so can we.
If being alive is the paintbrush with which we make our art of living, then the page is often the sketchbook that helps us carve out our unfolding sensemaking endeavours. As Black reminds us, we show up on the page for good reason:
“Short answer: it’s what makes us human. Art makes life worth living when you practice it, absorb it, or long for it. Art helps us live with meaning, purpose, and joy.”
the page helps us make art. this doesn’t have to be a creative art; the act of living itself is a creative undertaking. the page is where we think, where we whine, where we dream, where we do. on the page, we celebrate, we document, we ask, we receive, we connect and disconnect. it’s where we mourn and grieve, where we connect to reality or transport ourselves to some other world; it’s a place of planning and checking off, of recording and erasure. it’s a space uniquely human, for no other known species has the page as one of the objects that mark the marks they leave upon this earth.
P.S. as for the History in 100 Objects project, I was delighted to learn that the exhibition will be available for international touring from August 2028, especially if you didn’t catch the earlier international tour that touched down in Abu Dhabi, Taipei, Tokyo, Canberra, Beijing and Shanghai.
thanks to Marisabel for hosting this month’s IndieWeb Blog Carnival on the theme of Pages—read more thoughts on the marvel that is the page over on her website.
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