Will my readers know me and remember me?

          I’ve often felt a desire (maybe not a need, but more just something I would want and value) to be remembered by those who come after me. My own descendants as well as, hopefully, a larger set of future individuals. One of my biggest anxieties about my mortality is to be forgotten. Not only to be remembered by my name, but to be somehow remembered as me!

     I know I cannot directly speak with those who come after me, but I hope that in my work, both professional and creative work, I can in some way “speak” to those who come after me. Thus, when I write (or draw or paint), I always have this sense in the back of my head that I am in some way communicating with not only my current readers (whoever they may be?!) but with readers from the near and distant future.

     But, my question is, no matter how clearly I write, no matter how personally-felt my message is – do those readers of the future really KNOW me? Is it as if they sat down and spoke with me. I’m not sure.

     But is that what we really want when we write or paint or compose music? Is our goal to have ourselves known, or should we be satisfied with the thought that our work, our creative endeavor itself, survives, in some way.

     If you think about all the creative outpouring of humankind over millennia, how much of that enormous extent of creative and technological and scientific work can be ascribed to a known, named person? I can bet that most of that work was written by now-anonymous authors.       

     In my novel, Signs on a Page, I also discuss this somewhat sad fact – so many of the contributors to humankind’s ancient intellectual discourse are anonymous. Whether by their own design or by merely being forgotten. I’m sure that maybe the engineers who designed the pyramids in Egypt were known, at least by some people, at the time they lived and worked. But within 50-100 years after they had died, I imagine they were forgotten. For every Shakespeare or Melville or Fielding or King, there must be many more who wrote works that were lost or were combined into larger works without their names being recorded. How many actors had an influence on Shakespeare as he crafted his plays, whose names are forgotten or at least their role has been rendered unknown by time? For those of us who feel our creative pursuits are stranded in the enormous outpouring of humankind’s endeavors and we are merely ghosts in that incredible sea of creativity, we can at least feel proud to be a part of that ancient intellectual discourse.

     To what extent, however, do we “know” these people, even if we don’t know their names or faces? Is my desire to communicate with my followers through my work, the products of my endeavors, only fanciful or, in some way, realistic? Wonder the ideas of other creatives on this point?