How We Disappear – Thomas S Mullaney

“Suddenly, in 1823,” Andrew Robinson wrote, “the span of recorded history expanded by some two millennia; the pharaohs began to speak to us directly through their stone monuments.” Stories of restoration, recovery, and breathtaking technological leaps hold a strong grip on our moral imagination. They are the flip side of “transitive disappearance,” after all: moments when humanity’s ingenuity and goodness shines through to counteract our sins of violence, incompetence, and frailty.

The term salvage archaeology captures this drive perfectly. It describes the work of archaeologists who rush to save historical artifacts from destruction, often just ahead of bulldozers and construction crews. No wonder we should choose to name this act of preservation after the ancient biblical idea of salvation. Entropy offers no hope of salvation, however. Only of rechanneling entropy: of moving a given set of traces from one degradation pathway to another. At the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Carl Haber is one of the world’s leading experts on nondestructive analysis, an umbrella term for investigative processes that reveal properties or characteristics of a specimen—historical artifacts, in his case—without damaging or destroying the specimens in the process.

In conventional and long-standing forms of analysis, one must be willing to submit a specimen to irreversible forms of damage: to cut off sacrificial pieces and subject them to various forms of chemical or other studies. A shard of pottery or cutting of paper to be lost forever, turning every act of understanding—learning the date in which certain paper or parchment was made, perhaps, or its chemical composition —into an act of destruction. Novel technologies like hyperspectral imaging, fiber-optic reflectance spectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and X-ray fluorescence are changing all this, using microwave, sound, and light analysis to give us what we want in terms of data without the muss and fuss of annihilation.

Haber is at the forefront of this movement.

Soon, you won’t remember this. This book begins with the death of a man—my father, Thomas Charles Mullaney Jr.—and ends with the death of a woman—my mother, Meredith Lynn Mullaney. But it’s not a book about death, or an extended memento mori on the fragility of life. If death steals the last breath from our bodies, this book is about a process that reaches across all space and time to erase or scatter any evidence of our existence.

This is a book, not about how we die, but about how we disappear. it all began in June of 2017. Doctors found cancerous growths in Mom’s body—her fourth time battling cancer, if memory served. Following invasive surgery, Mom was in recovery, relying on our father for everything. Then Dad had a stroke. He collapsed onto the bedroom floor, calling out in vain for hours. (Mom and Dad had slept in separate rooms for over a decade by then, not- divorced divorced.) Mom found him in the morning.

My wife and I were in California, expecting our first child. We hadn’t told anyone yet. It was the first trimester and anything could happen. “Can I share the sonogram?” I asked Chiara. For someone as superstitious as me, it was a stunning departure. If my father was going to die, I just wanted him to know: I might become a father too. Chiara agreed, so I captured a shot of the thermal printout with my iPhone, a photograph of a photograph, and hurried it off to Mom with clear instructions.

Please show this to Dad, I texted. But no one else. Dad saw the sonogram and phoned me from his hospital bed. I missed the call—I can’t remember why. One moment, the man in voicemail- 82.m4a was my father. The next, a stranger with a mouthful of wet gravel. Hello Tom, it’s your father. How are you doing? If you get this message now, call back on your mother’s cell phone . . . OK, take care. Look forward to talking to you.

That’s great news about you and Chiara. Give us a call as soon as you can. OK, thanks. ER doctors stabilized his body and set him on the road to recovery.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 1b7a8a73c55d18ea
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 3,523,029 bytes (3.36 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 167
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 262.32 minutes
• Total Words: 52,465
• Total Characters: 326,824
• Average Words per Page: 314.16
• Average Characters per Page: 1957.03

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