Is timelessness forever?

Can art ever be truly timeless? It’s an almost universally accepted idea we have of great art that if it is truly great, it will “stand the test of time”. What does that mean, exactly? Simply that it still appears just as fresh, insightful and powerful as it did when it was first created. The point we can infer from that is that these great works of art are not slaves to fashion, but strike somewhere near the heart of human nature, which is unchanging over thousands of years—a fact which we know primarily from the classics. When we read an old play that is a relic more than it is a classic, that is usually because the artist was so seduced by some particular artistic fashion that was sweeping his part of the world at the time, that he forsook a true depiction of human nature in its favour. That seduction must be strong, because proportionally speaking, the amount of classics the world has produced is close to nil.

It is easy, and probably true, to talk of Shakespeare and Cervantes and Michelangelo and Mozart as creators of timeless art. It is certainly true that we still appreciate them now, and that that appreciation is not so much dependent on any historical fascination they might hold, but on their intrinsic merits, which speak to us just as powerfully as they ever did—and indeed which invite constant streams of new and inventive interpretations and understandings.

However, it’s also true that this idea of timelessness can all too easily become mythologized and metaphysicised, and their creators nearly deified as a result. Since most of us mere mortals are incapable of properly grasping why exactly it is that they have stood so solidly against the ravages of time, we are inclined to feel that these great artists spend only half their time here on earth, and the other with the gods on Mount Olympus, privy to some higher knowledge always and eternally beyond our reach. We imagine that the spans of time that have tested these works are long. One hundred years, some say, is the amount of time beyond which one can easily say, “this is a classic, and this is not.” But what about in ten thousand or a hundred thousand years? Will Shakespeare still be revered then?

It seems likely, if only because even if writers eventually surmount him, that is no reason for his work to be considered of lesser value. Shakespeare superseded Chaucer, but we still read the latter. But what about in millions of years?

An interesting fact about literature that sets it apart from other mediums is that it rests upon a pretty arbitrary foundation stone—language. Almost all classics are considerably weakened in translation. Although there are great translations that rival the originals, it is safe to say that to fully appreciate a great work of literature, you have to read it in the original language. But no language lasts forever. Even though it is likely that English, for instance, will survive a few more centuries, and even if it undergoes less change than it did over the past 1,000 years, it can only survive if the geopolitical situation of the world doesn’t drastically change. It is not even possible to say that that will be the case in a hundred years’ time, let alone a thousand. It may be a cliché to say, but if China continues its rise to world domination, Mandarin may take the place of English as the world’s most spoken language, and English may eventually become a minority and thus become extinct. It may even be replaced with “Panglish”, a variant of English that contains so many international contributions as to be virtually unrecognisable.

You might object, of course, that hardly anyone apart from classical scholars speaks Ancient Greek nowadays, and yet the works of Sophocles still survive, and are still loved. That will probably become the situation with Shakespeare soon enough, as it already is with Chaucer. But we are still relatively close in time to the Ancient Greeks. It is still quite easy to see their cultural influence upon us, and therefore it makes sense that people should want to learn Ancient Greek. But will this still be the case in hundreds of thousands of years? It’s quite possible, but it seems that the further away we get from Ancient Greece, the less likely it will be.

Can we truly say that something is timeless if it rests on such an arbitrary foundation as language? We probably can, but only if we say that language itself is not arbitrary, it is only individual languages that are. Instead of thinking of Shakespeare’s works as he wrote them as the “original Shakespeare”, perhaps it is more useful to think of them as translations of Shakespeare—the best ones available, but translations nonetheless. All writers struggle to formulate the words to best express what they want to say, so in that sense when Shakespeare wrote he was only translating into English the thoughts that he and his characters had.

But there is another, perhaps more serious objection to the idea that a work of literature (or art generally) can be timeless. Our appreciation of art depends on human nature being as it is. But what if it were to change significantly?

This is a question that would undoubtedly baffle even the greatest of evolutionary biologists. Is it even possible to assert that, no matter how much we might change, there may still be some crucial aspects of our nature that will never go? It seems hard to imagine, for instance, that we will become less intelligent. The converse is not true, either: it’s not obvious that we will become so much more intelligent, because we don’t all choose partners solely based on their cognitive faculties. So while it is not obvious that we will become more intelligent, it seems unlikely that we will become less intelligent, and virtually impossible to conceive that we will become so much less intelligent that we are unrecognisable as humans.

Suppose we become considerably more intelligent. Imagine a world where each of us could individually prove the Riemann hypothesis in five minutes at the age of two. Would Shakespeare eventually seem backward? It’s quite possible, but in any case rather difficult for such a backward homo sapiens as myself to contemplate. Some might recoil at the image conjured, and picture a lifeless society where such things as love don’t exist. But there is no logical reason to think so. After all, emotions exist for a very good reason. Indeed, they must be more important to the continuation of human life than intelligence, because even if we were all born with full knowledge and understanding of the fact that we must procreate, from whence would come our inclination to do so?

To imagine that the appreciation of Shakespeare is a solely cognitive task is to wildly swerve from the truth. Shakespeare’s plays are intelligent, but they do not require the mental effort that quantum mechanics asks of us, and in any case there are playwrights like Beckett and Pirandello who are arguably more sophisticated, at least in a non-dramatic, conceptual sort of way, than Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s brilliance (as well as that of other writers at his level) is in his insightful portrayals of the lives of people. Even if we become more intelligent, would our lives become significantly different that these portrayals, as insightful as they are, might just become fascinating relics and records of a period in our evolutionary history?

It is, perhaps, impossible to say. For all that we might speculate, there are countless ways that the human species might evolve, and it’s difficult to tell whether any one of them will have a significant effect on our relationship with art. But perhaps it is fair to say that our instinct tells us that we won’t change so dramatically. When we look at our relatives in the animal kingdom, we are fascinated not just by the ever-surprising variety of nature, but also by the similarity to ourselves. For the most part they do not experience the pain and pleasure of their existence like we do, yet there is a sense in which, that one difference aside, their lives are fundamentally the same as our own. So perhaps timeless art is not just timeless for human beings, but for all equivalently intelligent animals? Or perhaps that’s just something that someone in the infancy of his species’ evolution would say.