Edition: U.S. / Global

How to Make a Time Capsule

Published: December 5, 1999
(Page 4 of 5)

The comment was liberating. Instead of the editors deciding on the type of container, or leaving its design to engineers, why not turn to people who spend every day trying to balance technology and beauty? So last spring the editors invited 48 architects and designers from around the world to take part in a competition to design a time capsule. The task was to create something that could not only resist vandalism and decay for 1,000 years but also wouldn't be forgotten.

While the designers were at work, debate about the contents unfolded in a series of magazine meetings. Right away, the arguments began to favor ''best of'' lists and various canons. Is Joyce's ''Ulysses'' really this century's most important novel? Does the Bible go in? The oppressive drone of the institutional voice began to creep into the deliberations.

''Why not put our best foot forward?'' one of the editors asked. And why not? Who's going to trash themselves in a time capsule, even ironically? (Well, maybe the Danes: a recent time-capsule exhibition in Copenhagen included one made by a prostitute, containing dirty hypodermic needles.)

What changed the dynamic of the conversation was the paradox of the digital gap. Almost everything today gets recorded, yet almost nothing will survive. At the same time, we can safely assume that the Important Things normally stuffed into time capsules -- the Bible, Shakespeare, a great novel or two -- will be around in 1,000 years because that's what culture does. It is libraries and museums, universities and churches, that keep the most precious sacred and secular texts alive in the minds of people.

But somewhere in the middle -- between the works of art pushed forward by culture and the furious digital evaporation under way most everywhere else -- a question emerged: What are the items or ideas, practices or habits, that won't survive the cultural winnowing of the next thousand years and yet would offer some idea of who we were and how we lived?

So began an effort to assign a series of articles, each of which would function as a kind of search engine designed to generate answers to that question. The capsule contents, then, would be proposed not solely by a committee of editors in New York but by a wide range of people all over the world. Their suggestions are featured throughout this issue, a special copy of which will go into the capsule. The final choice of what artifacts, or realia, to include depends on space and will be made next spring, when the capsule is sealed. No doubt there are things in this capsule that will soon seem as brittle as the Westinghouse prose of 1939. Yet, taken together, the contributors have created a mosaic of our moment, offering a bunch of best feet forward to be sure, but a couple of other feet, too.

V. In which the editors search the city for a safe repository

The Times Capsule will be located in New York City because, well, the editors did get provincial here. There was talk of Nevada salt flats and abandoned missile silos. But if there is anything about this capsule that captures the fleeting optimism of our time, it's the faith implied by its siting.

And in this city, the most obvious place to bury a time capsule was at its very heart: in Central Park, the most sacred ground in Manhattan. So two editors were dispatched to sound out Henry Stern, the parks commissioner. Mr. Stern, an amiable and eccentric man, prefers to be addressed by his nom de parc: StarQuest. ''Stern means 'star' in German,'' he explained, ''and I ask a lot of questions.''

StarQuest had few questions, actually, but he did have a couple of discouraging answers. The slightest change in the appearance of the park would require the approval of every community board adjoining it.

''There's five of them,'' StarQuest said, as a bureaucratic pall descended over the room. ''Also you'll need the approval of the Central Park Conservancy and the Historical Society,'' he continued. ''And of course Mayor Giuliani, too.''

Almost as an afterthought, he warned that the mayor might be a problem if the capsule contained a mention of something controversial like the Amadou Diallo situation. (For Y3K readers, Diallo was an unarmed African immigrant whose death in a hail of police bullets provoked months of protests in early 1999.) The editors said that, while a mention of Diallo was highly unlikely, they couldn't make any promises. After an awkward silence, StarQuest dismissed the delegation. The editors' subsequent phone calls and e-mails went unanswered.

Meanwhile, the editors approached the curators at the American Museum of Natural History, men and women who spend their days caring for a wide assortment of relics, from dinosaur bones to pre-Columbian carvings. Right away, the curators were excited about assuming guardianship of the Times Capsule, and began talking about a thousand-year display. This flustered several of the editors, who clung to their subterranean prejudices. Burying something out of sight is antithetical to the curatorial mind, but it is oddly comforting to editors, for whom phrases like ''closing the issue'' and ''putting the paper to bed'' are synonymous with happiness and well-being.