Perspective: The memorabilia we bury is often less important than what it reveals about our efforts to bypass institutional memory
and blue surgical gloves to handle the delicate contents, including books, pamphlets and newspapers. One by one, the soggy contents were removed and quickly whisked away for preservation. Like time capsules, which have a designated date for reopening, cornerstone or foundation boxes seem to belong to another era, when brass bands gathered to celebrate civic events and mayors gave pompous speeches redolent of racism, class privilege and unembarrassed fantasies of national destiny.
“Time capsules have always played a role in preventing collective amnesia, even more so now with the concept of the memory hole,” says Waterman, referring to an idea popularized in George Orwell’s “1984,” now used to suggest both the political and technological erasure of history.
But common to both projects, and to many contemporary time capsules, is some basic magical thinking. Creating a physical time capsule suggests that one has lost faith in all the larger “time capsules” that are fundamental to national, institutional and traditional forms of memory. Consider