The Enduring Nature of the Written Word

My son came up from Kalamazoo for a five-day visit over the Thanksgiving weekend, and somehow on Sunday morning we found ourselves pawing through an old trunk I had not opened for years. Oh, the treasures that emerged from that archive! 

There were letters he had written me from camp when he was a kid and a little stash of hand-made “coupons” he’d given me as a gift, coupons I could redeem for various chores he would do around the house. “And you didn’t use any of them,” he noted. “I didn’t want to give them up!” I told him. “They were too cute!” Another gem was a handwritten note from a girl in his grade school class, asking me for a copy of a snapshot I’d taken of the two of them at Ian’s birthday party. “I want to see how romantic we look,” she wrote. Or rather, she printed. They must have been in third grade then, not yet learning cursive writing. 

Copies of letters my grandmother had written to my mother were there, along with a copy of a letter one of my aunts had written to my mother, all of this fascinating correspondence concerning the revelation of an old family secret. I read the letters aloud to my son, refreshing my own memory with the details. I’ll keep in mind this winter the fact that my mother’s parents were married in February of 1918, making it a century ago three months from now. 

I found a box of color slides from photographs I took during my two years in Cincinnati (1987-88) and will have those made into prints and also stored on DVD very soon. (The architecture of Cincinnati fascinated me, as did the hilly terrain. It was rich territory to explore with a camera.) I also found handful after handful of photographic prints, some dating back fifty years or more. The color was not always the best, but everyone in the pictures was recognizable.

A very modest collection of receipts and tissue wrappings from purchases (e.g., cheese) made in Paris appeared. I could never bear to throw away any scrap of paper that came my way in France, with words printed in French and sometimes a reproduced line drawing of a shop front or of the Eiffel Tower. You must understand that I shivered with pleasure over the phrase “vêtements d’hiver” (winter clothes) scrawled on a box in the closet of the apartment where I first stayed in Paris. Four years of high school French and the smattering I’d picked up before that from my father had not fully prepared me for the wonder of being in a foreign country and actually managing to make my way around in another language, one I felt I’d learned in a way somewhat similar to the way I had learned to read music, another mysterious, magic, “other” language. It worked! I felt like a gifted code-cracker!

But there is plenty of magic in English, and I was thrilled to discover in the trunk a couple of irreplaceable family items I had been afraid I’d lost forever. Before they married, before they had even met, my father and my mother, each separately, collected into little books their favorite poems. In 1974 the two books were given to me. With the exception of one verse my father composed with his high school French, my parents did not themselves write any of the works in their books, but their selections are windows into their youthful sensibilities. 

What did these two young people have in common? What aspects of their personalities were very different? Some overlap between the two collections gives clues, as do the majority of items found in one book but not in another. 

Neither book has either table of contents or index, but my father’s, titled “Favora Quotation Gilberti,” dated1941, begins with an “Indication of general trend…” listing eight attributes: amusing; slightly risqué; cynical philosophy; toward celibacy; satire; truism; good phrasing; and romantic: beautiful and healthy sentiment. Not everything in his book is a poem. Many entries are simply pithy sayings, and many verses and pithy sayings are attributed to “Anon,” for example this ironic observation that gives the lie to my entire thesis today:

Lives of great men all remind us 

As their pages o’er we turn, 

That we’re apt to leave behind us 

Letters that we ought to burn. 

There is no indication which heading he would have assigned here. Cynical, probably. There was more of cynicism and satire in my father’s collection than in my mothers, but both had generous helpings of romantic choices. And both include pieces by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, though I note that my father attributes the latter’s words to “Elizabeth Browning,” omitting the poet’s family name, while my mother invariably used all three names.

My mother’s collection includes Sara Teasdale, Eugene Field, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. I don’t find as many entries from “Anon.” as my father had, but a few, such as the two lists “Helps for Daily Living” and “Married Wisdom” have no attribution. (Actually, the latter, which is the first piece in her book, says “Author Unknown.” Could it be that favorite of my father, “Anon.”?!) My mother’s collection also has more entries from women, the names often unfamiliar to me. There are also fewer humorous pieces in my mother’s book, so Richard’s Armour’s “A Thousand Times No” stands out: 

Some take great pride in saying No, 

They scorn an easy Yes. 

Assent is sign of weakness, so 

To none will they confess. 

For utterance of No they live, 

Nor would they have you doubt it. 

They’re very, very negative 

And positive about it!

At the end of my mother’s collection, following Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Use of Time” and Sarah Dunnings’s “These Things I Love,” comes a list of dated topics for what looks like a music class, “Hints for Song Leaders,” “How to Present a New Song,” and finally a recipe for Helen’s Peanut Butter Cookies, but my mother’s name appears nowhere in her book.  

Besides family memorabilia, I found in the trunk many bundles of letters from friends, a few with literary associations. There were two letters from Jim Harrison, one from Joyce, Jim’s assistant, three from Guy de la Valdene, and one from poet Dan Gerber, all these resulting from typing, proof-reading, and editing I’d done for him and Guy and Dan back in the old days. 

Then there was a xeroxed copy of the wonderful handwritten journal my sister kept on her first trip (with now-husband Bob) to the Boundary Waters, up from Minnesota into Canada, her first wilderness experience, with canoe portages and camp coffee and losing her camera to a black bear! I read aloud from the pages to my son (with David listening from the next room) and especially loved the full page listing of all the sounds of the wilderness, none having anything to do with traffic or phones.

All these memories are priceless to me, despite the mustiness of a trunk that had been closed for years. 

As I held color slides up to the light, exclaiming over the images, my son made a comment about digitizing old media files, and that’s well and good, I suppose. But if hard copies are not kept, if only digital files remain, I worry that those files could become unopenable black boxes to future generations. They are not, after all, human-readable, and as the technology to read digital files advances as breakneck speed, earlier readers become so much junk. There is also the question of “where” the files will be stored. In a “cloud”? As my son noted, “A cloud is just someone else’s computer.” 

I’ve never liked the idea of keeping my photographs or books in a cloud, anyway, and I wouldn’t want to reduce precious old letters from friends and family and photographs of same to someone else's storage black box. My old black trunk has served me well. And I have always been in love with paper and with holding physical objects in my hands. 

Sliding sheets of handwriting from envelopes (first appreciating the beautiful postage stamps), turning pages, shuffling and stacking snapshots and slides are pleasures I have no intention of foregoing, as long as they are available to me, and I hope that will be for the rest of my life.

Human-Readable Media

Owner and writer of the little book

I have written before of this little book, purchased at an estate sale, but why did I wake in the dark this morning thinking about it? Whatever the stimulus, I was motivated to pull it from the shelf once again and carefully, slowly turn its pages.

Opened from one end, it is a book of accounts, interesting for its own sake. Here is an entry for receipt of $100 for teaching four months in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, in 1853; Received of James, $42; Borrowed of William, $10; Received of Directors of Gretna Academy for services [teaching] during the month of March, $45.90. Such were items of the young man’s income.

His expenses, naturally, were more varied. In November 1853 his fare to Dunkirk was $5.30, dinner at Dunkirk 25 cents. Another $8.55 took him to Cincinnati, where he purchased “refreshments” for 20 cents and a volume of Pope’s essays and a Harper’s magazine for 50 cents. For a dollar he went to the theatre, for 50 cents bought a penknife. Clothes were not cheap -- $14 for a coat and $6 for a pair of pants – but while shoes might set him back five dollars, he had (presumably) another pair mended for only seventy-five cents.

A page of his accounts

Handwritten personal accounts from 1853. When I first got it home, I thought that was all the book contained, and yet I was well satisfied with the couple dollars paid for it, interested to see a young man recording that he had purchased [Charles] Lamb’s Works and Dickens’s Pickwick Papers for $1.75 over a century and a half ago. Many entries were in soft pencil, worn by the years. Others, easier to read, had been written in ink, but it is not still a book to be read hurriedly, and so it was quite a little while before I discovered more to it than lists of income and outgo.

Following the handful of pages of itemized columns comes something quite different, pages of closely written lines beginning,

You may wonder that I do not delight to recall the pleasant scenes of the past any more, the boyish reveries at twilight, lovely day-dream fragments of poetry that was never written but in my heart.

Was this the draft of a letter or an essay or only the private outpourings of a young man’s heart? He writes that while the romantic coloring of boyhood is no longer with him, he does not despair of its return someday and meantime takes a more sober enjoyment in work.

A page written in pencil following the two previous, in ink, that began with the quoted line above is titled “Life – Its Enjoyments” and starts off with a salutation, “Ladies and Gentlemen.” So, perhaps a public lecture? The writer was clearly working through his theme as he wrote. Certain words and lines are crossed out, showing that he revised his language as he went along.

A century and a half ago, I remind myself, he sat with this book before him and applied his thoughts to the pages now before me. Did he write by candle or kerosene lamp? I cannot see the young man, but I can look into his mind and his life, thanks to his written words. How much did he pay for the little blank book? How much for a bottle of ink? For pencils? Surely he never imagined a woman in northern Michigan in the 21^st century reading what he had written!

Note that this book is not one of hundreds printed. It is unique, a “one-off,” as people say in our times. What were the odds against its coming into my hands at all?

Does anyone reading this post remember what I wrote of the little book when it first came to me? If so, you may recall that it served the young man as a diary when opened from the other end (follow the link above to read more of the life recorded in the journal), and there, like so many other writers of journals, he begins in a serious vein:

Tuesday evening. August 29. 1854. 

This is a lovely evening, and I must, therefore say something about it in my journal. I have been taking one of my old walks up in the clover-lot. There was a time when I walked up there every evening, and watched the sunset, and the sky grow dark, as the shadows of twilight gathered around, and the stars come forth, and all o’ that. And every time my enjoyment was seemingly new. It was such as I seldom feel now.

Does this journal entry echo the prepared talk at the other end of the book? It seems obvious that the talk issued from the same feelings and around the same time, although it’s difficult to guess which was written first.

What brought on the writer’s gentle melancholy? A pencil note made later under the date notes that he was 21 years old in 1854.

First page of handwritten journal

Soon, on January 5 [1855], he writes, with joyous little feeling for the day, “Birthdays are said to be mile stones on the pathway of life.” He goes on to say that he had been urged to go out to a “donation party” that evening, “but I had no mind to.” During this time of his early teaching career, he is “boarding” in two different places. “I dislike this moving about....” Away from home, living with strangers, working hard, wearing out his eyes. But when the superintendent comes to his school, everything goes well.

Sunday -- March 18, 1855 

I didn’t calculate to write any in my journal, but as I sat here that peculiar feeling came over me which always makes me look for a pen or a friend. I am at Rev. Mr. Smith’s. Elizabeth has just gone up stairs. She has been reading to me as my eye is rather bad. Cassy has gone to meeting with her father. It is all quite still....

Imagine the minister’s daughters, kind Elizabeth, exuberant Cassy, and the emptiness of the parlor when they are gone. No friend near, the young man picks up his pencil. (Despite what he wrote, he seems to have had no pen nearby.) His journal must be his confidante.

It is impossible to imagine a 22-year-old in America today in a similar situation. Today, with cell phone always in hand, friends are always only a click away. The entire world is only a click away! Can a young person today even begin to imagine the nineteenth-century journal writer’s solitude? And here’s another question: Can he or she read a single word of the faded cursive handwriting? No batteries or software are needed to make the writing visible, but the words on the page must still be read, and we are told that as young people no longer to write cursive, they have also lost the ability to read it.

But maybe our generation is too pessimistic when we imagine handwritten documents becoming inaccessible even where preserved. Maybe cursive handwriting, like cuneiform, will be translated anew by some future generation, old thoughts discovered, dead voices brought back to life.

Imagine such a future, when phone text messages and e-mails have evaporated and blogs vanished into the ether. Will our great-grandchildren take up diaries written before the Civil War as a hieroglyphic challenge? Will they feel the excitement of discovering an ancient and forgotten world?

What of today’s world, though? Our thoughts and musings and memories? Will all that be nothing but a gap in the historical record? An era of unrecorded history?

Letters tucked in between diary pages