The enormity of human history often feels incomprehensible. This vastness creeps up on us in the most imperceptible ways, whether it’s reading names inscribed on the remnants of the Berlin Wall, or staring face-to-face at a thousand-year-old portrait of a young woman. What never fails to strike me as remarkable, however, is the familiarity of the human experience – how grappling with the magnitude of time, and the weight of our history, has always stuck with us. 

The Colossi of Memnon have stood in the ancient city of Thebes, now modern-day Luxor, since 1350 BC – that is, for over 3,000 years. Immovable edifices in an eternal landscape, these statues have endured the rise and fall of many a civilisation, the cracking open of the earth, and the annual soothing balm of the Nile. But what makes this monument even more extraordinary is its history layered upon history: tourists from across the ancient world who had inscribed their names on the feet of the statues, immortalised their own existence, and intertwined it with all that came before. There is an urge to shout through the vastness of time: “I was here, I existed.”

The ache to remember and be remembered is one of the most important things that makes humankind human, and this hasn’t changed across the sweeping expanse of time. As we visit, photograph, read, and discuss such monuments, we too become part of their history, and we preserve the ache that is undeniably universal – one that transcends time, language, religion, identity, or culture, and is recognisable in every context.   

If you take a stroll around Oxford, you’ll find this desire isn’t so distant, even now. The parapet of the University Church tower, accessed by a winding spiral staircase, with footsteps moulded into the stone by centuries of use, is home to a plethora of memories. The names of students, lovers, and visitors are each engraved into its very fabric, attesting to their own existence, with the church as their witness, and us as their audience. The antique shops nestled along the High Street speak to this longing to remember. Brimming with brief snapshots of lives lived, each nook and cranny is inundated with photograph albums in gilded metal cases, carefully crafted jewellery, and curated collections of miscellanea. Even as I thumbed through my library book this morning, reading around the furious scribbles in the margin, I found it hard to ignore the fact history is quite literally in our hands: it is ours to preserve and ours to create. 

Studying archaeology in Oxford, a city where researchers, tourists, readers, and students alike converge and continue to breathe life into its history, it feels necessary to also contemplate our future. What sort of evidence will outlive us and become artefacts of our time? How might future civilisations try to create a cohesive image of our age? Would such a thing even be possible? Rational answers might point towards the assortment of memorabilia found in those same antique shops, or documents and keepsakes scattered across attics and basements, maybe even tucked away in purpose-built storage. Yet, though entirely reasonable suggestions, this increasingly digital age makes the physical survival of memory seem more of an afterthought. 

Only this year it was revealed that the AI company Anthropic scanned and digitised millions of books in order to train its AI models, destroying the original physical prints afterwards. This not only sets a deeply worrying precedent, but amplifies how it is now more poignant than ever to continue to be vigilantly commemorative, and to take control of the narrative of our history. Such physical, tangible history shouldn’t ever become a luxury, and the scarcity of evidence only seems reasonable in an ancient context, where accident of survival tends to prevail. It feels imperative, then, to print photographs, write dated diary entries, buy newspapers, make scrapbooks, send postcards: physically record those mundanities of daily life which are so often easily forgotten, yet so frequently serve as reminders of the comfortable, familiar humanity we share with our ancestors across time. 

That said, when reflecting on our digital age and its impact on our material history, it seems naive not to also consider the consequences of our existence on the very planet which we inhabit. Given the state of the current climate crisis, concerns for the survival of our physical remnants seem almost trivial – the defiant longevity of plastics will outlive their creators. The writing spelling out our existence is not only on the wall, but in the water, inside our bodies, stacked high in landfill sites, and buried in the soil: an indelible legacy of plastics and pollution. In droves, the oceans and seas will quite literally regurgitate our past from their waves, spitting it out at the shoreline. Considering a plastic Mars Bar wrapper from 1986 was found on a Cornwall beach in 2019, we might envisage the fortuitous nature of future excavations looking to understand us. Evidence, it seems, will inadvertently be in abundance for the age of humanity that resists obscurity. But what planet will remain hospitable to such legacies? 

Of course, this isn’t to say blame should be assuaged from the larger corporations responsible for generating such immense scales of pollution on our planet, nor to shift moral culpability, but rather to empower the individual. We shouldn’t underestimate the power of our own individual impact in changing this. There is action in hope – an emotion so intrinsically human – and where there is hope, there is humanity. If we’re able to preserve and reanimate so much of our past, then we must also have the capacity to create with more intention and to consume with more conscientiousness, so that we may have a planet where our legacies thrive. 

“Jaffa cake?” These are the first words I hear upon stepping into Oxford’s Death Café. We’re in the Old Fire Station on George Street, a venue for all kinds of offbeat activities: indie theatre, standup, and its kitchen, which operates as a social enterprise run by women refugees. At 5pm on a Monday, it is deserted. Already running late, I get lost on the street, knock on the wrong door, and finally blunder into a lobby where there is absolutely no noise or company. Tiptoeing timidly to the desk (and banishing mental descriptions like dead silent and silent as a tomb), I stage-whisper into an intercom: “I’m here for the Death Café.”

Was that right? Should I look sadder, perhaps? A receptionist tells me to go right; I nod and shuffle past with a solemnity that instantly strikes me as pompous. It is already unspeakably awkward.

Theoretically, I know what to expect. Death Cafés emerged as a movement in Switzerland and France in the 2010s and spread across the world. Billed as casual discussion forums, they encourage participants to engage in frank dialogue about the end of life: what is death? Why do we fear it? How does dying shape the way that we live? It is a specialist salon, a café philosophique turned morbid. Bernard Crettaz, the sociologist who inspired the cafés, wants to end what he terms the “tyrannical secrecy” around death. We should be able to discuss it without stigma, he says – the subtitle of his book is Sortir la mort du silence (‘Bringing death out of silence.’)

So far, silence is prevailing. In the Old Fire Station’s canteen, a dozen strangers sit around a table; none of them are talking (sepulchrally silent, silent as the grave). I am conspicuously the youngest. Anne*, whom I later learned is the group facilitator, heads the table. She is 84 and strikingly sprightly. Cheerfully, she slides me a cardboard carton: “Jaffa cake?”

We all take some. There’s an air of manic jollity about the whole thing; it reminds me of people who dress up as Disney princesses to visit children’s hospitals. For about five minutes, I gaze into every unoccupied corner of the room, counting tiles and committing wall art to memory. No one says a word – small-talk has been utterly disabled.

When we finally start, Anne asks us to introduce ourselves. Then she smiles and says calmly: “We’re all going to die. Not pass away, not go to a better place: we’ll die.”

It’s a bit shocking. Around me, though, other participants are nodding: a few chime in with agreement, saying that they only learnt the stock phrases as a way of sounding decent around others. “I couldn’t say ‘my dad’s dead,’ it sounds crude” – these euphemisms are not coping mechanisms but social rites, like wearing black. Someone adds that their kids are confused by decorous phrases. If her grandmother has “passed away”, does that mean she’s coming back? If she’s “gone somewhere”, where is she? We are all here to try and regain the abilities we had intuitively as children – speaking forthrightly, living in the present.

Anne’s ban on euphemisms sets the tone: we discuss the ways in which dying is sternly practical. A printout on how to arrange a Power of Attorney circulates around the group. If death is grand and mysterious (“that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns”), dying is relentlessly banal. We discuss bedsores, waning appetites, the larcenous cost of burial – someone laments that they had to take weeks off work to care for their critically ill father, despite only anticipating days.

“I don’t want people to find my body”, somebody pipes up.

“Because it’ll upset them?’

“No – I’m scared I’ll smell bad.”

Slowly, imperceptibly, the ice breaks. We talk about things we want to do before we die (for me: write a book). We exchange concepts of the afterlife. Death Cafés brand themselves as nonpartisan, “with no agenda, objectives or themes”. I do notice, however, a preponderance of Buddhists and spiritualists in the circle; a theory that we all belong to one ‘indistinct mass of energy’ is advanced and receives approving nods. It is not that these belief systems are more morbid. In fact, the opposite may be true. If death is the resetting of a cycle, a passage to one more mortal lifetime, then why fear it? Why hold it apart from – or even contrast it with – life? It is an illuminating thought, and impresses even me, the staunch nontheist. 

Interestingly, two people in the group are ‘death doulas’. Members of this burgeoning profession, including Hamnet director Chloé Zhao, pitch themselves as midwives for the end of life. While not medical professionals, they provide emotional and practical assistance to the dying. The two at the table describe their training, which includes lying in a wooden box and imagining their own funeral.

Is it useful to picture death? Is it helpful to talk about it, or just self-indulgent? Over the course of the meeting, the dread that I felt at the beginning was slowly replaced by shock, then relief. The Death Café is mundane. I had worried about lacking the special vocabulary, the necessary concepts. But what I saw was that death is pieced together from the most commonplace pieces of everyday life. Grief, tedium, guilt, vanity, humour, superstition. None of it requires a new language – just the courage to use the old one. Death is silent (as a crypt, as a vault, as a mausoleum). We don’t have to be silent about it.

* Not her real name.

Death Cafés were founded by Jon Underwood based on the work of Bernard Crettaz. Information can be found at      deathcafe.com.

A new secondhand bookstore opened in Oxford city centre last week. Located in the Golden Cross shopping centre, just off Cornmarket Street, the bookstore stocks hundreds of secondhand books, ranging from accessibly priced paperbacks to rare and expensive antiquarian first-editions. It was previously home to dessert cafe Fluffy Fluffy, and before that, it was an optician’s.

Its four co-directors, Helen Flatley, Mehdi Bensenane, Scott Moynihan, and Sumner Braund, who have backgrounds in medieval history and philosophy, opened the store in order to provide a boost to secondhand bookselling in Oxford. Helen, a medievalist and history lecturer at the University of Oxford as well as co-director of the store, said: “Some of us did our PhDs here and have been thinking for quite a while that Oxford needs more secondhand bookshops, so that was the inspiration for it.”

“Effectively, we’ve built the kind of bookshop we ourselves would like to go to”, Helen told Cherwell. The store stocks a wide range of genres, including ancient philosophy, medieval and modern history, and fiction. Its site dates from 1496 and is thought to have links to Shakespeare. According to the store’s Instagram page, the bard is rumoured to have stayed in the building in the seventeenth century, when it was a coaching inn. He is also rumoured to have put on a production of Hamlet in the Golden Cross courtyard. The courtyard itself is one of the oldest parts of medieval Oxford, dating back to the thirteenth century, Helen explained.

The owners said they have been delighted with the response they’ve had since opening the store in May, especially from students. “We’ve been especially heartened by the amount of students that have been in”, Helen told Cherwell. The store aims to cater to students’ needs both in terms of stock and prices. Helen said: “It’s one of the things that we thought would be important, to have a range of prices, so we have many books that are accessibly priced, as well as some more rare and expensive things.”

Some of the store’s most noteworthy antiquarian books include a first-edition copy of George Orwell’s 1984, priced at £1000, and a 1863 copy of George Eliot’s Romola, priced at £200. The store also stocks some early illustrated editions of Shakespeare. The owners hope to expand the antiquarian side of the business, Helen told Cherwell.

As well as catering to students’ needs, the owners hope the store will provide tourists with a special insight into Oxford. Mehdi Bensenane, a philosopher originally from Paris, said: “When people come to Oxford, they do not go to Disney World or Paris or London, they come here for a reason. They are interested in the history of the place, in the humanities, and in the sciences.

“But Oxford can be rather opaque when you think about it from a tourist’s point of view. Buildings are defined not so much by what they do but who was their benefactor – Ashmolean, Bodleian. Colleges can be hard to access, too, as you have to pay to look around. So we wanted to create that Oxford feel, but with an open door. We’re hoping to create a network and a feeling of community for independent bookshops, whilst addressing the expectations of local communities and tourists.”

A number of Oxford’s independent shops have been threatened with closure recently. Riverman Records, a second-hand record shop and music store on Walton Street with a cult following, is facing an uncertain future as its landlord has submitted a planning application to turn the premises into living accommodation. Oxford’s longest-running independent cinema, The Ultimate Picture Palace in Cowley, is also facing the prospect of closing after its landlord, Oriel College, refused to extend its lease in order to allow vital investments and renovations.

Blackwell’s on Broad Street used to run a thriving secondhand and antiquarian books section, but has scaled down its operation in recent years. In addition, the future of the Oxfam bookshop on St. Giles’s Street has recently been thrown into doubt after Regent’s Park College, which owns the premises, submitted a planning application to turn the premises into an MCR. The application was rejected by Oxford City Council, and Regent’s Park has said that it is considering its options.