The display that haunted me though, was the plaster casts of the victims. They were displayed in dramatic lighting, the grand finale at the end of the hour-long immersive exhibit. One of the figures was so well preserved that when archeologists poured the plaster, you could see the ridged outlines of his teeth. There was a child who couldn’t have been older than eight. A guard dog, his limbs contorted in pain. One man crouched with his cloak over his mouth to filter out the ash, another reaching towards the sky, both forever trapped in their final moments, painfully, desperately human.
Right before the dimness gave way to the clinically-lit gift shop, they had printed a quote on the wall by Cambridge professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, that read “it’s a paradox of archeology: you read the past best in its moments of trauma.” That quote ran laps around in my head the rest of the week. First, it made me wonder about the lives of those plaster-cast people -- what would they have liked to be remembered for, thousands of years later, rather than their pain? Maybe for their empathy, or their killer sourdough recipe, or their poetry that they never got the chance to publish. Then, it made me pensive. It made me hopeful that I will be forgotten, for to struggle is to be remembered.