"There are more dead people than living, and their numbers are increasing." - Eugene Ionesco

Article:

The profound, albeit unsettling, observation attributed to playwright Eugene Ionesco – "There are more dead people than living, and their numbers are increasing" – finds a resonance far beyond mere demographic commentary. While demographers would naturally point out that the Earth currently supports a vastly larger living population than deceased at any single moment, the Ionescian statement invites a different kind of parsing, one that touches upon the nature of memory, influence, and the passage of time. It is a stark, potentially absurd reality viewed through the lens of human experience.

Our collective consciousness is undeniably saturated with the dead. History, literature, art, and cultural memory are dominated by figures whose lives ended decades or centuries ago. Kings, queens, poets, warriors, artists – their deeds, legacies, and sometimes quite significant misdeeds, persist long after their physical exteriors have crumbled into dust and their minds become unresponsive. We stand on the shoulders (if we can metaphorically identify them) of those who came before, and their "presence," even in rigor mortis, vastly outweighs the fleeting moments of shared life currently unfolding across the globe, perhaps even in this very instant.

This dominance is measured not by biology, but by influence. Think of the sheer volume of books, films, music, and philosophical traditions traced back to individuals widely considered "dead" – yet whose ideas still powerfully shape the living world. Their "number," immeasurable in its impact, grows exponentially as their work is adapted, interpreted, and rediscovered by successive generations. In the digital age, this phenomenon accelerates; countless individuals, historical and otherwise, are meticulously preserved, archived, and digitally reconstructed, maintaining an ongoing, albeit disembodied, presence online. Their individual counts, accessible to billions instantly, have indeed increased, and perhaps accelerated the erosion of the unique, lived experiences of the present generation.

Death, of course, is the absolute natural law ensuring that the living decrease and the dead statistically increase with each passing moment. Yet, Ionesco’s words evoke a symbolic doubling down: the acknowledgement that history, time, and remembrance construct a world where the effigy, the narrative, the remnant of the past vastly outweighs the simple, breathing life of the present. Funerals gather crowds mourning absences, museums display artifacts from vanished eras, and societies grapple with the unresolved issues and judgments left by those who have departed. We look backward, process forward, and find ourselves flanked by countless spectral presences.

Perhaps the chilling implication, the crux of the absurdity Ionesco might be hinting at, is the sheer weight of this silence – the dead overwhelming the living chatter of human existence. Is life, then, merely a footnote, a brief parenthesis to be punctuated by the punctuations of the departed? Or is consciousness, memory, and perhaps even identity something achieved through thought processes, giving the dead a continued, albeit disembodied, command over the living narrative? They are, in our minds, more present.

We honor, fear, or critique the "dead"; their stories echo through the halls of every institution, every conversation, every political decision. Our current lives, however tangible, seem but brief interludes between the eternal presences of yesterday and tomorrow. The melancholic or celebratory response lies in recognizing this potential dynamic – that our thoughts, actions, and creations, should also resist the overwhelming force of the dead. It’s a call, then, for intentional living, for creating our own meaningful narratives that might, in turn, reshape the future landscape dominated so heavily by the past. Yet, however we choose to interpret it, the inescapable fact remains: the voices of the departed, their specters, their legacies, indeed form a terrifyingly vast and ever-growing backdrop against which our fleeting lives play out.