A warning about what our future might be if our cultural heritage continues to crumble

BY ADAM GOODHEART

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The Future of the Past
By Alexander Stille
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 336 pages, $25

Four days after September 11th, I was supposed to be aboard a Pakistan International Airlines flight to Lahore, setting out on a journey that would lead me to the Afghan border at the Khyber Pass. I'd been planning the trip for months, with an assignment from a magazine to investigate the smuggling of ancient art and antiquities out of Afghanistan, a trade that had flourished for decades but swelled to a torrent under the Taliban regime. Alongside their highly public destruction of "graven images" like the famous cliffside Buddhas, the country's Muslim warlords had carried on a much quieter, vaster, and more lucrative campaign of dismantling precious archaeological sites and selling the bits and pieces overseas. It seemed like a pretty important story at the time.

All that changed, along with so much else, when the airliners hit the World Trade Center. Suddenly I found myself without an assignment: Broken statues weren't exactly the number-one Taliban atrocity on everybody's mind.

So it may be that Alexander Stille picked an inopportune moment to publish a dire warning about the state of the world's historic heritage. Just when we're all lying awake at night, preoccupied with the future, he's telling us it's time to start worrying about the past.

Okay, maybe that's being a bit pessimistic. After all, if you weren't still worrying at least a little bit about the past, presumably you wouldn't be reading this magazine right now. But according to Stille, the magnitude of the crisis is far more enormous, and broadly defined, than we've been able to imagine: It's not just about a few looted antiquities here and there, or some Civil War battlefields getting paved over as parking lots. "Our society is in the midst of a fundamental rupture with the past," he writes. In The Future of the Past, a collection of passionate and meticulously reported essays—written over the past decade and nearly all published previously in The New Yorker—Stille ranges across the globe, documenting the extent of the fissure so far, and hints at what may lie ahead.

In Egypt, the Great Sphinx, beset by pollution and misguided restoration efforts, is crumbling into powder; it still "stares impenetrably across the millennia," Stille writes, "but instead of contemplating the mysteries of existence its gaze is now trained at the Pizza Hut and Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants that have opened just two hundred yards in front of it." In a laboratory at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., wire recordings of Harry Truman's speeches rust into oblivion, and the Reagan White House's e-mail records, less than 20 years old, languish in unreadable computer formats—specimens of "advanced" information technologies that are proving far less durable than parchment and stone. On the island of Kitawa, off Papua New Guinea, the natives have traded their intricately carved canoes for motorboats, and must consult an Italian anthropologist when trying to recreate the traditional sequences of a sacred dance. A town in central Madagascar faces a stark choice: starvation, or the continued destruction of one of the richest rainforests in the world.

But Stille's book is far more than just a litany of loss and woe. He is passionately interested in why all this is happening, and in the larger patterns that emerge; his eye is keenly trained to pick out the threads that link, say, the death of a lemur and the loss of a manuscript. He is also sensitive to paradox, for example that "the loss of historical memory may be directly related to our thirst for knowledge and information." The book's first chapter drives this point solidly home: In the desert outside Cairo, tombs that have lain perfectly insulated under the sand for 4,000 years deteriorate within a few decades when scientists open them up to 20th-century air, and to the innocent exhalations of tourists from, say, North Carolina.

Even the most promising solutions usually turn out to have a double edge: Experts ranging from IBM programmers to Chinese archaeologists are hard at work perfecting ways to duplicate vanishing treasures, but their success only justifies letting the originals slip away. The Egyptian government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild the famed Alexandria Library—at a moment when its National Library is in a shambles and its censorship of books and newspapers is on the increase. Stille is an indefatigable reporter, remarkable especially for his willingness to stray off the beaten path, whether into the complexities of a Latin text or the rivalries among Mogadishu's warlords. Indeed, his chapter on Somalia is especially masterly, and unexpected, as he narrates the comedy and tragedy that ensue when a society goes, within a single generation, from oral poetry straight to videotape. Given the book's range, it seems petty to complain that The Future of the Past is marred by occasional lapses in erudition. (Kennewick Man was a partial skeleton, not a "frozen corpse"; Raphael could not have been inspired by the frescoes of Pompeii, which remained buried in ash until nearly two centuries after his death.)

The hero of Stille's book is Father Reginald Foster, a Carmelite monk from Milwaukee, a quixotic crusader in a blue polyester jumpsuit, who's on practically a one-man mission to save the Latin language. Foster, the Vatican's senior Latinist, has lived in Rome for many years, where—with the sort of loud enthusiasm that you'd expect at a Big Ten football game, not at the Pontifical Gregorian University—he teaches the language of the Caesars to anyone who cares to come and learn it. ("Latin is one of the greatest things that ever happened in human history!" he declares on the first day of class.) Foster's story reminds us that even in the darkest days of the Visigoths and Vandals—or in our own, post-Vatican II era—there have always been a few passionate scholars who kept the flame of classical knowledge burning.

So perhaps as long as we've got a few Fosters to count on, we can all rest slightly easier about the future of the past. Not long after the liberation of Kabul, the New York Times reported on a museum curator there who'd risked his life to save paintings from the Taliban, staying up at night carefully painting over human figures in watercolors so the canvases wouldn't be destroyed. That was a hopeful sign. And so is a book like this one.

Adam Goodheart is advisory editor of Preservation magazine.

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