Unlike most of their precursors, today’s conservators have lots of good practice but little firm philosophy. But practitioners now aware that there are no eternal truths keep asking for them all the same. They would like to serve the angels, not just their clients and themselves. But the guidance they seek must be or seem specific—explicit and precise answers, if possible quantifiable. And we aim to oblige, sometimes unwisely.

Here’s an instance. When I taught conservation and preservation at University College London, I got heritage practitioners in the heat of combat to talk to my students. One day in the mid-1980s the secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) preached William Morris’s and John Ruskin’s anti-scrape dictum, never to restore or renovate, “Resist all tampering’” leave buildings alone, to age gracefully, save for daily care—an 1877 tenet SPAB members today still had to endorse.(15) “Well, I suppose that’s all right for old buildings,” said a young architect in my class, “but what about new ones?” “Certainly not,” replied the SPAB man; “nothing to do with modern buildings at all.” “So,” continued my student, “where do you draw the line?” The reply came at once: “1923.” Later I asked him how he came up with that date so fast, and why. “I knew he had me,” he said; “there was no answer; no old–new line makes sense. But if I didn’t come up with a date right away I’d have lost all credibility. So I picked a year long before his birth but not so far back as to seem ancient.” Beware the urge to seem explicit.

To be authentic now we can only sing the tune that suits today’s angelic choir—our own song, sounding right for our time and place. We cleave to our here-and-now tune in the certain knowledge that posterity will find it out of tune, cloying, or cacophonous, just as our conservation remedies will seem blinkered, crude, or tasteless. All we can hope is that our successors grant we did our clumsy best by our own dim lights.

By our own lights. What are those lights? What seems to me authentically modern is growing awareness of three heritage insights—

1. the past is gone and irretrievable
2. it nonetheless remains vital and essential for our well-being
3. we cannot avoid changing its residues, especially when trying not to.

At first glance, these insights seem at odds. Why care about what’s gone? In altering the past, do we not fatally falsify it? Would it not be better to forget it and move on?

Such doubts require closer scrutiny of the vanishing past. Thomas Carlyle, on reading Boswell’s life of Johnson, remarked how little survived of their tangible existence—

Rough Samuel and sleek wheedling James were and are not. Their Life and whole personal Environment has melted into air. The Mitre Tavern still stands in Fleet Street, but where now is its scot-and-lot paying, beer-and-ale loving, cock-hatted, pot-bellied Landlord; its rose-faced assiduous Landlady, with all her shining brass-pans, waxed tables, well-filled larder-shelves; her cooks, and bootjacks, and errand boys, and watery-mouthed hangers on? Gone! Gone!... The Bottles they drank out of are all broken, the Chairs they sat on all rotted and burnt; the very Knives and Forks that they ate with have rusted to the heart, and become brown oxide of iron, and mingled with the indiscriminate clay. All, all have vanished.... Of the Mitre Tavern nothing but the bare walls remain, and these also decaying, were they of adamant.(16)

So indelibly does Carlyle imprint that scene on our minds that we can scarcely credit its demise. Yet we do accept the past’s bleak irrecoverability. And in this we differ from those in earlier epochs, for whom the past remained alive and active.

In medieval times, for example, holy relics and the promised Resurrection embodied the past as a living force. It was a pervasive enduring influence—vital, potent, more often malevolent than benign, above all authoritative. What made relics authentic was what they did, how they performed. They continued to enact miracles. Those that ceased to function lost credibility. An authentic relic kept its ongoing promise.

Science authenticated the survival of a quite different Victorian past. Machine-age wizardry inspired faith that all history, hugely lengthened by geology and paleontology, could be retrieved. A record of all that had happened, even of every thought and memory, was stored in the rocks, in the oceans, in the very air. Nothing was lost. The whole past would in time be revealed, forecast computer inventor Charles Babbage.(17) And total retrieval implied total responsibility. Every malefactor would be held to account for every past misdeed; all sins would haunt their perpetrators.

Babbage’s retroactive morality was consonant with pious architects who restored Gothic churches as they should have been built in the first place, given Victorian good sense and skills. For similar ends, the historical novelist Walter Scott and his successors lent verisimilitude to antiquarian lore, making their tales vividly authentic to their readers. And re-enacted medieval tournaments and banquets far eclipsed the splendor of the originals.

Retrieving an imperishable past also shaped approaches to memory, which like artifacts were considered material substances. Memory traces were authentic fossils, potential travelers from infancy. Memories forgotten or repressed persisted in the mind, and would some day be reawakened, via Marcel Proust’s madeleines or Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalyses. The mind was a permanent storehouse of past experience. One had only to find a way of tapping into it. As late as the 1970s, most psychologists believed that original memories could be retrieved intact.(18)

Few any longer believe it, however. Psychologists now realize that memories are constantly eroded, overlain, subject to ongoing loss and accretion, just as heritage professionals recognize that all historic fabric is mutable and evanescent. Art conservators accept mutability as inevitable; museum keepers turn into curators of ephemera. Revision is the stock-in-trade of heritage stewards. The very elements are mortally unstable, transmuting over time into other isotopes. The dynamic processes of change are now more durably authentic than their transitory products.

But evanescence is a discomfiting, anxiety–laden truth, taken onboard reluctantly if at all. Memory’s unaltered permanence remains a firm faith among the general public. And hunger for permanence spurs the nostalgia for simpler times past that lends heritage much of its appeal. Disquieted by uncertainty and evanescence, we become frantic to save traces, record narratives, confirm ancestries. We feel called on to secure past residues against the fragile forgetful future. In contrast to the unreliable shifting present, the past seems securely fixed; that is one reason we prize it for its authenticity. “People want the places they visit, whether museums or parks, to possess authenticity, to be real—and to stay that way,” says landscape historian Charles Birnbaum.(19) This is true, above all, of our cherished heritage.

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