“The second law of thermodynamics is not to be negotiated with.” — Thomas S. Mullaney
The second law of thermodynamics is non-negotiable. Every schoolchild knows that. Everything decays and every record disintegrates. The universe will end. We all die. So why record history? Why bother remembering? These are the questions that the Stanford historian Thomas S. Mullaney addresses in his intriguing new book, How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information.
How We Disappear is triggered by grief. Mullaney’s father — a man he never quite understood, an exile in an estranged household — died unexpectedly in 2017. Sitting in his father’s office surrounded by the “paperwork of death,” Mullaney’s training as a historian crystallised into an all-too-personal project of disappearance. It’s a book about what Mullaney calls “intransitive disappearance” — not the spectacular, cataclysmic kind of traditional historiography (wars, book burnings and genocide) but the everyday, uneventful ways things fall apart. Like Thomas Mullaney’s dad. Existence as obsolescence, erosion, sinescence and the slow drift of the unremarkable into nothing.
History, in Mullaney’s account, is a Sisyphean fight against this nothingness. We tell stories to survive and maintain the polite appearance of coherence. If you actually tried to reconstruct experience — the thing-in-itself — you would need an infinite library of trillion-page books. Existence, for Mullaney, is a swirl of stimuli and daydream. History tries to domesticate this Borgesian swirl. So does consciousness itself. That’s why, as Mullaney memorably puts it, “historians do the dirty work of necromancers.” Which is to say they enter into negotiations with the second law of thermodynamics.
