I’ve always preferred a list to a narrative, and one of my favourite books is The Obituary of Richard Smyth.[1] The subtitle explains its ambitions: ‘Being a catalogue of all such persons as he knew in their life: extending from A.D. 1627 to A.D. 1674.’ (I like the monumentalising ‘A.D.’). Smyth (1590-1675) was a city law-officer, and an avid book-collector, and his text is a chronological roll call of people who Smyth (no relation) knew. It is an intriguing and powerful thing to do, to write down a list through time of everyone you know who has died. My first thought on imagining the task is how thankfully short mine would be, until I start to track beyond my immediate community into people I knew a bit, or once, or in passing, and then names start to pile up.
Coming at this from the other end is Sam Winston's "Birth-Day" (2013). He started off drawing small circles to "chart the 183,600 lives that come into being on the planet over a period of 12 hours" but that turned into an exhibition at the Southbank Centre where the public were invited to chart the births and deaths with circles on one mural and with text on another (https://www.samwinston.com/projects/birth-day). So moving from raw, large-scale statistics or lists to the personal within them -- and vice versa.
Apr 19, 2023·edited Apr 19, 2023Liked by Adam Smyth
There is so much left unsaid by these entries that the imagination instantly fills in. I want to know more about whether Mr Oglethorp’s office got much work done that day, for example. But the brevity of the entry about his son makes it all the more brutal.
And there is something very democratic and levelling in the great and the good rubbing shoulders with ordinary people - Strafford as next door neighbour to Wagstaff the bricklayer.
Anthony Sharp, vintner, died
Coming at this from the other end is Sam Winston's "Birth-Day" (2013). He started off drawing small circles to "chart the 183,600 lives that come into being on the planet over a period of 12 hours" but that turned into an exhibition at the Southbank Centre where the public were invited to chart the births and deaths with circles on one mural and with text on another (https://www.samwinston.com/projects/birth-day). So moving from raw, large-scale statistics or lists to the personal within them -- and vice versa.
There is so much left unsaid by these entries that the imagination instantly fills in. I want to know more about whether Mr Oglethorp’s office got much work done that day, for example. But the brevity of the entry about his son makes it all the more brutal.
And there is something very democratic and levelling in the great and the good rubbing shoulders with ordinary people - Strafford as next door neighbour to Wagstaff the bricklayer.