Permanence

by Professor Malvolio

Perhaps the most unintentionally absurd moment in Aaron Sorkin's excellent The Social Network comes when our fictive Mark Zuckerberg confronts his fictive ex-girlfriend in a fictive tavern and she says to him, "The Internet's not written in pencil, Mark, it's written in ink."  This is both funny and poignant because it strikes me as exactly the sort of idiotic thing a thoughtless member of the digital generation would say.  Because from where I'm sitting, the Internet is the living definition of Impermanence -- written not in pencil or ink but air.

You want to talk about permanence?  Or, at the very least, durability?  The following are photos of paleolithic cave paintings that are among the very first examples of material culture in human history, ranging from roughly 15,000 (Lascaux) to 30,000 (Chauvet) years old.  Real human hands (and mouths too -- it's believed that some of the effects were created by holding the paint in the mouth and blowing it onto the wall) painted these -- and no one knows exactly why.  Just looking at the photos is enough to cause goosebumps, but I'm told that the experience of actually standing in the caves before the actual paintings is one of the most awe-inspiring and humbling experiences imaginable.
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Chauvet:

 

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Lascaux:

 

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These ones are my favorites.  They come from Rouffignac and those, my children, are mammoths.  Drawn and painted by hands that were attached to living people who had eyes that had seen the real thing....

 

You wanna talk about goosebumps?

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Of course the great irony of the Caves is that their rediscovery by humans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their inevitable opening (for a while) as tourist traps, has resulted in serious damage to some of the ancient environments as well as the paintings themselves.  Some of the most awesome of the caves -- Altamira, Lascaux, I think Chauvet -- have been rightly closed to all but authorized visitors (who are admitted under very tightly controlled conditions) and rebuilt in elaborate replicas so that people can have something approximating the experience of seeing them while still protecting and preserving the real sites.

If the Internet (let alone the human race) is still around in 30,000 years I'd be surprised.  But only then, I think, will claims of permanence be justified.  In the meantime, wrap your brain around this:

That's a 30,000-year-old human handprint from Chauvet.

I've got goosebumps....