The [Face]Book of Antecedents

I recently read Jonathan Safran Foer's excellent 2002 novel Everything is Illuminated. [review]. The author reaches back to his great great great great great grandmother's miraculous birth to help uncover the story of his grandfather's escape from a Nazi occupied Ukrainian village. Foer explores the tradition of written history in Jewish culture in a variety of ways to tell the fictionalized tale of his ancestral shtetl. The villagers kept a collective written history and maintained it obsessively filling volumes with everything from important events to vain minutia. The tome, dubbed, "The Book of Antecedents" sounds very familiar as it is described.

The Book of Antecedents began as a record of major events: battles and treaties, famines, seismic occurrences, the beginnings and ends of political regimes. But it wasn't long before lesser events were included and described at great length --festivals, important marriages and deaths, records of construction in the shtetl (there was no destruction then) --and the rather small book had to be replaced with a three-volume set. Soon, upon the demand of the readership --which was everyone, Uprigher and Sloucher alike --The Book of Antecedents included a biennial census, with every name of every citizen and a brief chronicle of his or her life (women were included after the synagogue split), summaries of even less notable events, and commentaries on what the Venerable Rabbi had called LIFE, AND THE LIFE OF LIFE, which included definitions, parables, various rules and regulations for righteous living, and cute, if meaningless, sayings. The latter editions, now taking up an entire shelf, became yet more detailed, as citizens contributed family records, portraits, important documents and personal journals, until any schoolboy could easily find out what his grandfather ate for breakfast on a given Thursday fifty years before, or what his great-aunt did when the rain fell without lull for five months. The Book of Antecedents, once updated yearly, was now continually updated, and when there was nothing to report, the full-time committee would report its reporting, just to keep the book moving, expanding, becoming more like life: We are writing...We are writing...We are writing..."

I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg read Everything is Illuminated while developing Facebook at Harvard? Or perhaps Foer was inspired by the then recent success of Wikipedia? Either way it makes you wonder about the virtual book of Antecedents we're all creating.

The other day I clicked the, "Older Posts" button at the bottom of my Facebook wall until I had unrolled the scroll of my entire 4 year history on the site. Every important event and bit of vain minutia I ever cared to share laid out before me. In an attempt to capture this virtual time line of my life I tried a variety of browser plug-ins that save entire web pages as images. I crashed every program I tried. The pictures were too big, too much information for the programming to accommodate. The Bookcase now collapsed under the weight of my [Face]Book of Antecedents.

Knowing that my grandchildren really will be able to easily find out what I ate for breakfast on any given Thursday, (Breakfast Tacos) I wonder will they care? Should we take Foer's warning to heart? Is our impulse to document, organize, and share our lives; to approximate them for a future generation getting in the way of living them? If we spend too much time writing our story, will it even be worth reading?

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