By: Aaron Bailey

It’s an indescribable feeling when you realize that you’re crossing a boundary into an epiphany. I’d compare it to becoming lucid while dreaming or being aware of a new understanding. However, an unsettling uncertainty also accompanies it.

It started between the stones of the granite memorial in central Berlin. Something about their stark plainness, how ordinary they were, made me stop and consider the idea that they could still exist even if all of their context was destroyed with us who put them there. That, as entities, they might still stand, but the millions that they were made to memorialize could easily be forgotten. I thought of an article that I read announcing the death of the last WWI veteran, Frank Buckles. I remember feeling so very young when I read it, but I failed to grasp the substance of such an event. With Frank left the last remaining, primary source of history about the First World War. Such a vastly significant piece of human existence is now only known through written accounts, oral tradition, or the limited media that we have from the time. And how fragile those pieces of history suddenly become. Memories seem hard to kill, but what strength is there in paper or the tangled telephone line of passed-down stories? Avoiding Orwellianism as best as I could, I still stuck on how the truth of such records could be upheld if there was no living person to refute their first-hand authenticity. I remembered my Grandfather and Grandmother, who served in the British army and met during WWII. Although I was fortunate enough to directly experience their stories and memories, soon the last of their generation will also move on, meaning that my children and their children’s children will only learn the terrible lessons taught by the Second Great War from textbooks and videos. Without the ethos of those who lived it to preach, can we be sure that something just as unthinkable won’t grip our world again? Will the books, pictures, and stories fight hard enough, or will the field of granite stones eventually become just that? Realizing this, the last stage of my epiphany balanced on myself. My experiences will also be caught up in the stream of time, and there isn’t anything to be done to stop the process.

Awakening to your own insignificance is at first breathtaking and panic-inducing, but it gives way to a silent tranquility and a freedom to live for the sake of living, instead of trying to carve out some niche of legacy in the riverbed of history.