Time Capsules

Things are documents of their time.

Things can be reinterpreted in the present. Things can acquire a new meaning in the future, but the future can only be built on the remains of the past.  

When I was eight years old, our class placed things into an airtight container, a time capsule, my teacher called it. We buried it within our school grounds. I contributed some drawings and my favourite eraser. The idea that people would come across our time capsule one day, perhaps hundreds of years into the future, impressed me deeply. 

Soon after, our school closed to accommodate a nursing home. It was built directly over the time capsule burial site. As far as I'm aware, the time capsule remains buried on the hill slope where I used to play kiss chasey. 

My siblings and I had to transfer to another school. 

Growing up, I would read to my sister and brother from the Harver Junior World Encyclopedia Set from 1971. We would flip through the pages and venture to exotic places. When it was time to look at the gargoyles, we would be quick to turn the page. We were all scared of the angry, haunted faces that were attached to the old buildings. We were also fascinated by them. We didn’t see any gargoyles where we lived. Did they only exist in faraway lands?

A few years later, I used information from the encyclopaedias to present my own booklet about animals. For weeks I would wake up early to trace pictures and modify text until it felt like my own. Finally, I decorated my cover with coloured cellophane and entered it into the school competition for one BIG encyclopaedia. 

I won. 

I felt so proud.

The same man that presented me with my new encyclopaedia was the same man that had told me off for talking to my friends during class. 

I remember you. Are you sure this is yours?

I think so.

I attribute my love of books and travel to those outdated encyclopaedias, and a capsule of information from my generation. If I could travel back in time and tell my younger self that encyclopaedias will be accessible through a network of connected computers and regularly updated by people from all over the world, I am sure she would be delighted.

We, too, are documents of our time.

We reinvent ourselves in the present. We give our lives meaning, but we can only build ourselves from recollections of the past.