Introduction

• “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. There is no other explanation for his curious enduring fascination with the Tasmanian tiger.”
• “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.”
• “Writing, which the Khwarezmian scholar Al-Biruni once described as a being propagating itself in time and space, was from the outset a system for passing on information in parallel with inheritance and irrespective of kinship. By writing, as by reading, one can pick one’s own ancestors and establish a second, intellectual hereditary line to rival conventional biological heritage.”

Writing cannot bring anything back, but it can enable everything to be experienced.

Tuanaki

• Atoll of there islands that disappeared circa 1843
• Inhabited by peace-loving people

Caspian tiger

• Driven to extinction by hunting, habitat loss by 1960s
• Story set in Colosseum, battle staged between tiger and lion

Guericke’s unicorn

• Skeleton recreated in 1663 by physicist Guericke, now thought to be composed of bones from several Ice Age species like the mammoth and wooly rhinoceros

Villa Sacchetti

• Built in 1600s; deteriorated through 17th and 18th centuries; last remnants gone by 1861
• Protecting old relics → “the past is not over; it is just that the future has already begun.”
• 1760s → scenes and structure sketched among other ruins by Hubert Roberts (eventually detained by French)

Emerald of Death: The Boy in Blue

• 1919 film, no copies known exist anymore

The Love Songs of Sappho

• Composed around 600 BCE
• Musical accompaniment to her songs, along with much of her poetry, may have been destroyed during wars, etc.
• Some fragments preserved through quotation in other works

The Von Behr Palace

• Mansion built in Behrenhoff region of Germany in 1840s, inhabited by aristocracy for awhile, burned down in 1945

The Seven Books of Mani

• Proselytizer in 200s; spread his religious views v widely → most writings and teachings destroyed in Middle Ages

Greifswald Harbor

• Caspar David Friedrich painted in 1810s, destroyed in 1931 fire

An Encyclopedia in the Wood

• 1950s, some guy moved to his plot of land in a chestnut grove and began enscribing 1000+ of metal plates with human knowledge from all subjects
• After death in 1970s, house was cleared out, collection of books and almost all metal plates destroyed
• “My guiding principles are: read everything that can be read. Put like with like, and keep everything you’ve read. Only write down facts, knowledge that can be verified. Wherever possible, keep phenomena separate from established rules and always start with the general and work towards the individual.”

Palace of the Republic

• 1976, completed as symbolic government building in East Germany
• Built with lots of asbestos cement to secure building vs pressure of groundwater
• 1990 after unification, palace slated to close bc asbestos; 1998-2003 companies removed 5000 tons of sprayed cement from building; 2006 on finally began to be disassembled to other raw materials
• 2013, reconstruction of Berlin City Palace began

Kinau’s Selenographs

• Topographical maps of the moon
• No trace of the man exists anymore, except for allusions to him having published to drawings...