ABSTRACT
Most people are dead. Or as we might otherwise say – releasing them from the limbo of the present tense – most people have died. On one estimate, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world’s total population represented roughly 6 per cent of all the people who had ever lived.2 This proportion is always changing, of course, and there could come a time when the number of the living exceeds the number of the dead. The real point, however, is the one famously made by the economist John Maynard Keynes – namely, ‘In the long run we are all dead’ (note again the present tense).3 And a further point is this: all but the tiniest proportion of those who have ever lived, not just individuals but entire communities, have been completely forgotten. Following Keynes, then, we can also say that ‘in the long run, we are all forgotten’. In the face of these inexorable facts of life and history, the following question may very well seem, if not facetious, then at least ridiculous: Where have they all gone, these almost entirely anonymous multitudes of the dead? And where will we, currently the living, go?
