David Eide – Opinions Columnist

Just recently, I found myself in the back section of the Book Mark, where all the textbooks are kept and which was briefly open for public view and perusal during the Nobel Conference.  Befitting a liberal arts college, I noticed a lot of classical texts: Plato’s Republic, the Aeneid, the Odyssey, you know, the stuff you would expect to see in any self-respecting classics department.  However, I also happened to notice a collection of the plays of Aeschylus. Aeschylus wrote 70 plays over his lifetime, but only six have survived to this day.  This got me thinking about lost works of literature and lost media more generally, a subject that has interested me for a long time.  There is something both deeply fascinating and deeply eerie about a work that was once enjoyed by many people just no longer existing, leaving only the slight imprint of its presence for us to uncover and wonder about.  I think a brief exploration of the facets of lost media will do a lot to elucidate why I feel this way and might even help some lost media be found.

A great majority of the ways literature is lost stems from the way that texts were transmitted through time.  Since the printing press wasn’t widely popularized until the 1500s, that meant that every individual book had to be made by hand, and when those books needed to be replaced, someone had to painstakingly transcribe each letter of the original copy into a new book.  In effect, this means that if one of these scribes didn’t particularly like a certain book, they could just not copy it, which would result in its being lost to history.  This happened a ton, and we have lost a huge amount of the literature of the past forever.  One intriguing instance of this from classical history includes the lost books of Livy, who had published a detailed history of Rome up to his lifetime. Only the first 20 or so books have survived to the present day.  Another tragic loss to the advance of time is that of the poems of the famed poet Sappho, much of whose work was lost after Greece switched away from speaking the dialect her poems were written in, leading them to fall into obscurity until their rediscovery centuries later.  I could honestly go on and on, if you’ve ever read a work by an ancient author, chances are pretty good that a vast majority of the things they wrote have vanished into the mists of history.

However, simple neglect is not the only way that ancient texts were lost, and many works of literature were destroyed in acts of oppression and colonial violence.  The instance that most comes to mind is the destruction of the Mesoamerican codices during the Spanish conquest of Mexico.  The Aztecs and the Maya had a long history of creating various works of literature on bark codices that contained histories, poetry, and religious rituals and stories.  However, when the Spanish arrived and began their colonial conquest of Mexico, they ordered these codices destroyed as the fanatically catholic Spaniards viewed them as “pagan” and “satanic”.  As a result of this zealotry, the vast majority of the codices which contained so much important information on the Aztec and Maya were consigned to flames.  Only a half dozen or so codices survived this purge, a fact I find deeply depressing.

Believe it or not, ancient works of writing aren’t the only pieces of media that have become lost; indeed, we’ve lost media from not even a century ago.  One period that has seen a number of lost works is the early period of filmmaking.  Due to the fact that films were seen as inherently unserious at that time, little effort was put into preserving them and many were lost, either simply due to not being kept or because they wound up being destroyed because the material they were on was literally spontaneously combustible.  One of the most famous lost films is London After Midnight, a silent horror film starring famous actor Lon Chaney that was lost in a 1965 fire at the MGM vault which destroyed the last remaining copy.  Indeed, it has been estimated by Martin Scorsese’s film institute that over 90% of all silent films ever made have been lost, a pretty crazy statistic in my opinion. These were movies that people in the past watched and enjoyed just like you or I, and now they just don’t exist anymore, and I find that very eerie.

To me, the appeal of learning about lost media is two-fold.  On one hand, you have the element of mystery, of learning the tantalizing information that we do know about the lost media and trying to piece it together like some kind of detective or paleontologist.  On the other hand is the knowledge that the work will probably never see the light of day which you just kind of have to accept as a fact of history and hopefully learn to appreciate what we have a little bit more.  When these two are combined you get the weird feeling I have towards lost media. I’d really like to see them be found but I know deep down it’s highly unlikely they ever will.  Still, highly unlikely isn’t never, and works that have been lost for centuries have been recovered. So the possibility is still there, elusive as it may be.