Mark Medley’s book Live to See the Day chronicles multigenerational projects around the world.Colin Medley/Supplied
- Title: Live to See the Day: Impossible Goals, Unimaginable Futures, and the Pursuit of Things That May Never Be
- Author: Mark Medley
- Genre: Non-fiction
- Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
- Pages: 368 pages
The part-blessing, part-curse of human life is mortality, and our awareness of it. Dying is one thing, but knowing you’re going to die is another. That our lives are bounded by time, by a hard limit, can grant us both a sense of meaning and of urgency. For all those who dream of immortality, the notion strikes others, including myself, as boring. At some point, what’s left to do? Besides, we’re all counting on inheriting a home, right?
Limited life-spans don’t preclude multigenerational projects, though. They might preclude seeing the end of such projects, be it a 12th-century cathedral or humanity embarking on interstellar travel from Earth to Proxima Centauri b. It may seem paradoxical that we undertake long-term projects we won’t live long enough to see all the way through, but we do, and we show no signs of giving up the tendency.
Supplied
In Live to See the Day: Impossible Goals, Unimaginable Futures, and the Pursuit of Things That May Never Be, Globe and Mail journalist Mark Medley offers an account of several such projects from around the world, from the search for undiscovered creatures to missing persons or treasures and on to projects to protecting the Earth from asteroids or convincing human beings to ease themselves into extinction. The book is a blend of history, psychological study, biographies-in-miniature and travelogue.
Books we're reading and loving
For all its exploration of the fantastic and extraordinary, Live to See the Day is familiar, even intimate. Who hasn’t dreamt of lost treasure or visiting planets beyond our reach? Who hasn’t picked up a project, however grand or small, without fully knowing why or whether we’ll see it through? Perhaps our pursuits might not be on the same scale as Heather Newton, whose career is dedicated to restoring Canterbury Cathedral, or Jonathon Keats, who is taking a photograph with a 1,000-year exposure, but we plant trees that will grow beyond our lifetimes, we write books we hope will have some sort of shelf life, and we start families who’ll carry on our legacy and pass down treasured family keepsakes to them.
Medley’s accounts of generation-spanning projects are inherently interesting, and made all the more so by his skills as a journalist and eye to telling a story and emphasizing the humanity – and human-ness – of those whose stories he tells. A lesser writer might have been inclined to write off these characters as quacks, kooks or charlatans. Or worse, hopeless cases whose life projects are meaningless. But in each case, Medley’s efforts leave you hoping for their success, perhaps notwithstanding Les Knight, who wants to see humanity go extinct, though of our own volition.
Mark Medley: This year, I’m making a resolution I know I won’t achieve
As much as the projects Medley covers are fascinating – the chapter on Ron Feldman’s hunt for the Lost Dutchman’s Mine deserves a book of its own – the probing questions of why give the book a welcome depth that takes it beyond stories to study. Why would someone hunt for an animal the world believes to be extinct, spending their own limited funds in the process? Why would a researcher dedicate their lives to searching for theoretical or technological breakthroughs that might help humankind travel light years centuries or more from now? There is no single answer, but who would expect there to be? It can’t be that simple.
Some of those Medley chronicles are inspired by childhood experiences, others by raw curiosity that emerged later in life. Some are driven by obsession, others by a more grounded passion and a love of process – a love of the game itself. Fortune and glory feature as they must, but Richard Thorns, for instance, who is searching for the pink-headed duck, lost to humankind for a hundred years and thought to be extinct, seems more motivated by a desire to share a beautiful creature with the world, even if he wants to change history in the process.
Reading through Live to See the Day, you can’t help but think of cathedrals, and not just because the example pops up throughout the book. We can visit cathedrals today. We can see them and we can place our hands on them. We know what those who built them knew, that the labourer who laid the foundation wouldn’t survive to see the spires or attend a mass within its finished walls. But they were a part of something that would outlive them, something of a gift to posterity, a collective endeavour greater than any individual. In an era of internet-addicted, self-obsessed individualists prone to instant gratification, Medley’s work reminds us of the power and beauty and necessity of the slow burn – the very, very, very slow burn – and the long shot – the very, very, very long shot. That is a gift, and one that might even outlast him.