April is the cruellest month, T.S. Eliot said for reasons I’ve never really understood. In this year of wild weather and war, the line seems eerily appropriate however. It is enough to make one think the end is nigh.
Yet as I discovered as I researched my new book Before We Forget: How Remembering Will Get Us Through the Next 75 Years, there is plenty of evidence that our civilizations will survive calamity. The key will be remembering both individually and collectively, so we can recover and rebuild if worst comes to worst.
Left to its own devices the earth abides. Take the forest around Chernobyl, the nuclear reactor that melted down in Belarus in 1986. Deer, badgers, European bison, and many other animals now make it their home, even if radiation levels are still too high for humans return.
People who have faced catastrophe have been equally resilient. Even though many consider that the Roman Empire died when the last emperor was deposed in the fifth century BCE, its influence is all around us. It ranges from our legal principle that one is innocent until proven guilty to the languages derived from Latin which are spoken as mother tongues today by a billion people.
China is another example. It has survived several attempts by leaders to wipe out all that came before beginning with the First Emperor in the third century BCE and running through Mao Zedong more recently.
The societies of the North American Indigenous world are a third example. Despite being decimated by disease and then ground down by governments bent on what can only be called cultural genocide, numerous First Nations today are reviving their languages and cultures.
There are others, too, including those studied by researchers who reported in 2024 that societies which have undergone calamity seem to be more resilient than those who haven’t.
So, this April I think I’ll look at the blossoming trees and greening grass as symbols of not only nature’s usual seasonal rebirth but also of what we could do if we must. To prepare ourselves we need to safeguard our memories in libraries, archives, and data centres. We must also pass down our stories, skills and songs from generation to generation. We must not let April’s cruelty get us down.
In part an entertaining history of knowledge and where we keep it, Before We Forget allays fears and encourages people to develop strategies for safeguarding collective and individual wisdom, which we will need to meet the challenges ahead.