It’s almost exactly a year ago to the day since my wife Susie and I visited the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York, where we saw this mural.
The phrase is a quotation from Book IX of Virgil’s Aeneid, and it struck me then and now that immortality exists as long as there is memory. It’s more than 2,000 years since the Roman poet wrote these words, and they remain as powerful today as ever they were.
The blue tiles that surround the quotation are another piece of art in their own right.
‘Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning’ is composed of 2,983 individual watercolour drawings, commemorating the victims of September 11, 2001 and February 26, 1993. Every square is a unique shade of blue, reflecting artist Spencer Finch’s attempt to remember the colour of the sky on the morning of 9/11.
Yes that is a beautiful quote. I don’t necessarily think of it as about human memory but that time – the changing states of the universe which define time – has a memory of its own and that each event writes into the memory of time – a sort of ledger where everything is recorded in the fabric of the universe. In human life this means that each person who has ever lived has left a ripple in the universe that will be forever there and is indelible.
Thank you, john.