The Wit’s Guide to Ephemera

Or, trunkless legs

The emphemerist’s favourite bit of ephemera: Paper specifically designed to be thrown into the wind. I litter, therefore I am!

They say nothing beautiful lasts, but that’s a glass-half-empty view. Nothing ugly lasts, either! And soon the water in that half-full view will evaporate and the glass itself will crumble back into sand and you’ll think, boy was he ever right about that.

“Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.”
— Eugene Ionesco

The Greeks timestamped the word ephemera to describe something that lasts only a day. The insect order ephemeroptera is where you’ll find mayflies, which actually live for about a year as aquatic larvae before graduating into adulthood for one brief shining day or two. In the timeless words of Beyoncé, they woke up like this.

“All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike.”
— Marcus Aurelius

Counterpoint: We live a helluva long time. In his book When Einstein Walked with Gödel, Jim Holt unspools the argument this way: Consider the shortest measure of time in the universe, a Planck Time, which is 10⁻⁴³ seconds, or the time light takes to cross a Planck Length. (A Planck Length is the distance light can travel in 10⁻⁴³ seconds, duh.) There are many many many many many more Plank Times in a human lifetime than there are human lifetimes in the life of the universe. So as Roger Penrose, the physicist and subject of my friend Patchen Barss’s acclaimed biography The Impossible Man, wrote, “People talk about the ephemeral nature of existence but it can be seen that we are not ephemeral at all — we live more or less as long as the Universe itself!” A comforting thought, even if it requires the phrase “more or less” to support the entire weight of the universe, more or less.

“Without clocks we would live forever.”
— Marshall McLuhan

Ephemera also refers to printed material designed for a single use, and there are whole societies who collect this stuff. Postcards, ticket stubs, receipts, shopping lists: All of these are treasured, collected, and preserved by the very enthusiasts who celebrate their transience. They’re like the nature lovers who just can’t wait to bag a majestic elk and hang his head over the fireplace, only much less cruel. Do not cry for the receipts; they will not cry for you.

“How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.”
— Dorothy L. Sayers

The greatest poem ever written on the subject of impermanence will of course one day be forgotten — but not yet! “Look upon my Works, ye mighty, and Despair,” boasts the inscription of a long-crumbled statue in Ozymandias, the stone-cold classic sonnet by Percy “Bysshe” Shelley. The lines have popped up in Breaking Bad, Succession, and Alien: Covenant but what really earns them immortality is the delicious irony that the fraudulent and crumbled media empire Ozy founded by convicted criminal Carlos Watson was named for it.

“Some have taken the poem to mean that even mighty kings are eventually forgotten,” a deadpan 2015 piece in Fortune explained, “but Watson said the lesson he takes from it is that you have to dream big.” An update to the story “clarified that Watson interprets the poem Ozymandias to mean: ‘Think big, but be humble, lest you end up “two vast and trunkless legs in the desert.”’ And a further update from last week: Watson just had his 10-year prison sentence commuted by the U.S. President hours before it was scheduled to begin. And: Despair?

“Glory is fleeting but obscurity is forever.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte

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Riposte Cards are ephemera, bien sûr, but the good kind! I’ve commissioned 25 of these beautiful artworks from talented illustrators to date, and I send a new pack out every couple months to my lovely paid subscribers. I never ever (never? Well, hardly ever) send you mayflies. Join them, won’t you?

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“Life is too short to stuff a mushroom.”
— Shirley Conran

As I was tidying up my desk, I found this bit of ephemera (ephemeron?) with some topic ideas. Let’s throw ’em in the poll and see how they do!

That was Get Wit Quick Issue No. 301: Blink and you’ve missed it. If I got the physics wrong, tell me in the comments. I was going to dive into how newspapers are ephemera writ large (though writ diminished), but then couldn’t decide if digital is more or less fleeting. The Internet Archive saves most things but may well be sued into oblivion. And then what? Something else, probably. We’ll always have Ozy Media to kick around with our trunkless legs. The newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. You were born, you tapped the ❤️ below, you mattered! To me!