Judith Schlansky

Each disparate object described in this book--a Caspar David Friedrich painting, a species of tiger, a villa in Rome, a Greek love poem, an island in the Pacific--shares a common fate: it no longer exists, except as the dead end of a paper trail. Recalling the works of W. G. Sebald, Bruce Chatwin, or Rebecca Solnit, An Inventory of Losses is a beautiful evocation of twelve specific treasures that have been lost to the world forever, and, taken as a whole, opens mesmerizing new vistas of how we can think about extinction and loss. With meticulous research and a vivid awareness of why we should care about these losses, Judith Schalansky, the acclaimed author of Atlas of Remote Islands, lets these objects speak for themselves: she ventriloquizes the tone of other sources, burrows into the language of contemporaneous accounts, and deeply interrogates the very notion of memory.

An Inventory of Losses

taylor miles hopkins

"It seems to be one of the characteristics of western man that defies rational understanding that he prizes the lost more highly than the existing.”

All manner of strategies are used to keep hold of the past and ward off oblivion…Being alive means experiencing loss.

To forget everything is bad, certainly. Worse still is to forget nothing. After all, knowledge can only be gained by forgetting. If everything is stored indiscriminately, as it is in electronic data memories, it loses its meaning and becomes a disorderly mass of useless information.

Fundamentally, every item is already waste, every building already a ruin, and all creation nothing but destruction, and the true of the work of all those disciplines and institutions that claim to be preserving the legacy of humanity…the archives…are nothing more than managed cemeteries whose stored specimens, as often as not, have been plucked from the life cycle of the present to be filed away, allowed to be forgotten even…

What we do not know cannot weigh us down, we might think.

In a sense, the world is a sprawling archive of itself…

By writing, as by reading, one can pick one's own ancestors and establish a second, intellectual hereditary line to rival conventional biological heritage.

This book, like all others, springs from the desire to have something survive, to bring the past into the present, to call to mind the torgotten, to give voice to the silenced, and to mourn the lost. Writing cannot bring anything back, but it can enable everything to be experienced.

Almost nothing stokes fear as surely as having won power over an enemy to whom one still feels inferior despite the victory.

For a long time, three dots in a row along the writing baseline designated something lost and unknown, then at some point also something unuttered and unutterable; no longer only something omitted or left out, but also something left open. Hence the three dots became a symbol that invites one to think the allusion to its conclusion, imagine that which is missing, a proxy for the inexpressible and the hushed-up, for the offensive and obscene, for the incriminating and speculative, for a particular version of the omitted: the trurh

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