The Past Is Close at Hand

Where am I?

 

On Sunday morning I finished one nonfiction book I’d been reading and had knocked off the remainder of another in the afternoon after housework, so at bedtime I was thrown back on a volume from Robert Hale’s Regional Series, books written in the mid-20^th century on various parts of England, featuring history, landscape, architecture, and so on. This second one, Exmoor, I’m not finding as charming as Olive Cook’s Breckland (each book in the series has a different author), but I am not reading it carefully for legal-historical detail, simply as escape from the present to another place and time. The “historic” parts that please me most are the most purely local. Here is an example: 

 

"From here we will cross Hoar Oak Hill to Hoar Oak Tree. This celebrated tree was, from 1300 when the Forest was curtailed until 1815 when Simonsbath was colonized, one of the only two trees in the entire Forest. In 1658 it fell from “very age and rottenness,” and four years later a young tree was planted there to take its place, and this newcomer was in turn blown down in 1916."

 

-      Lawrence Meynell, Exmoor (1953)

 

Bits like that I slow down to read and re-read, picturing the scene in my mind. I wonder if the replacement tree was replaced in turn when it fell in 1916. The author doesn’t say. 

 

I didn’t read very far in that book on Sunday evening before falling asleep, however, because before picking it up I read my entire 190-page journal from December 12, 2019, to March 16, 2020, reliving a long trip west (seven days on the road, longer than usual because in New Mexico I was felled by what I considered at the time a migraine attack but have since learned was more probably vertigo), ghost town hikes and social events, a first exploration of Turkey Creek Road, our “Coyote Christmas” (I would link this if I could, but the platform is not cooperating), Sarah’s last full winter with us, the onset of the pandemic, and so much more. A friend and I had been trying to remember when she and her then-partner visited us, first in Willcox and later in Dos Cabezas, and both of those visits I found recorded in this 2019-20 journal, the first of a series that has now reached Vol. XIII and page 2240 (as of this morning), memories important only to me. 

Sarah in Tucson, Arizona

The Artist and I made a couple of trips to Tucson that winter and visited bookstores in the “Old Pueblo,” as locals still like to call their city. David loved Speedway Boulevard! I was happy to get back to our quiet ghost town. We both loved the old library in Bisbee. 

In the library, Bisbee, AZ

My son’s father died in the spring, and I spoke with my son by phone almost every day. The Artist and I found again, having become yearlings, the new foals on the edge of Willcox that had captured my heart the winter before. On Monday mornings I volunteered at the Friendly Bookstore and on Wednesdays at Willcox Elementary School. We made new friends in Willcox. I hiked with neighbors on our home ground and a piece of public land down the road. 

 

"Sandhill cranes not far off, heard before seen & sometimes not seen at all, they fly so high. Brief thrill of daily passenger train [speeding through town nonstop], and in the quiet that follows its disappearance, again the distant, purling music of the cranes, now visible overhead, sunlit in their turning."  

 

-      1/25/2020, Willcox, AZ

 

"A high forest of ocotillo as we climbed & at the peak gave way partway down along a fault line to beargrass at the sedimentary/igneous shift. Northeast slope, shaded, held surprising pockets of tiny ferns & flourishing mosses, & the trail in places was muddy. Moisture no doubt came from snowmelt; springs that high unlikely."

 

      2/3/2020

 

 

We saw the new “Little Women" film in Willcox, and a Stage-to-Cinema showing of “The Nutcracker,” the 1984 production of the Royal London Ballet created by Peter Wright. 

 

"And while a large group, we were told, had formed the afternoon audience, we were the audience at 7 o’clock. A private showing! As if we were the king and queen!

 

"David loved it every bit as much as I did. “Superb! Magnificent!” It was a perfect holiday gift. And before & after the show, there were the magical lights in Railroad Park, their glorious colors reflected in puddles from the day’s storms….

 

"Two years ago we went to Paris at the Willcox Historic Theatre when the show was “Figaro” from the Opera de la Bastille. Now, London. It would be thrilling to attend the opera in Paris, the ballet in London, but having these experiences in a little Arizona cow town & coming outside to the dark of high desert winter has a magic all its own, almost as unlikely as the fantastical “Nutcracker” story itself."

 

      - 1/29/19

Railroad Park, Willcox, AZ, lighted for holidays in 2019

Sketchbooks were still part of my life that year.

 

"I had two sketchbooks with me yesterday, having taken the second as a mental reminder to get started. [Apparently the second was still empty, the first almost full.] It isn’t that anyone else cares … or that I would “do” anything with [the] drawings, even having made them. It’s that I feel good when drawing. Leave thoughts & self behind. Exist purely in the moment. See fully. And afterwards I can revisit those places & times: by looking at old drawings, I am plunged back into the ‘now’ of ‘then.’"

 

-      1/25/2020

Exploring up Turkey Creek Road in the Chiricahua Mountains

The ‘Now’ of ‘Now’!

Monday, March 24, 2025

From ‘then’ I return to ‘now,’ as winter weather has returned once more to spring Leelanau, snow deep and heavy and still coming down as Sunny and I ventured out into the morning. Maybe I will not get to Northport today, after all, and that’s all right. There are potatoes and onions and lentils a-plenty in the house—“lentils for the apocalypse,” I found myself thinking, a thought perhaps arising from recollections of the drive the Artist and I made back to Michigan in June 2020, one night staying in a three-story motel in which we seemed to be the only guests, an eerie place I named “the motel of the Apocalypse.”

As always, the present is saturated with the past. We are time beings.

"No dog park today, huh?"

Note: As I say, the platform has turned uncooperative, and one of the several things it will not let me do is format quotations as indented paragraphs. I don't know if this is a temporary or a permanent problem. All I can do is use quotation marks and a different color font.

What am I doing here, anyway?

What am I doing here?

 

Five in the morning. Coffee. Thinking about blogging. Thinking about writing about blogging. Why on earth?

 

As a family or an orchestra comprises its members and a handwritten diary is composed of chronological entries, a blog is made up of chronological posts. A post is what is written and published on any particular day, and the blog consists of the entirety of its posts, from the first to the last. Since ‘posting’ is also a verb in the world of blogs, a post can also be referred to as an entry, which is legitimate usage, in that a blog is a kind of diary, although not usually added to on a daily basis (and how many people write in their diaries or journals every day, regardless of the origin of those words?).

 

The term blog (which some linguistical purists find abhorrent) comes from two separate words, web + log. The worldwide web, the ‘www’ in Internet addresses, needs no introduction online. ‘Log’ deserves more consideration.

 

In the early days of sailing, a ship’s log or logbook was, for one thing, a daily record of speed achieved and distance covered, as measured by how many knots passed through a sailor’s hands when a log trailing a knotted rope was thrown from the stern of the ship. (Hence the speed of a boat recorded in knots rather than in miles.) The captain’s log, however, also included important information on crew, passengers, and cargo; routes, ports, and destination; weather; sightings; damage, maintenance, repairs; unusual occurrences; etc. With its daily and sometimes hourly entries, the log provided essential information not only to captains on board but also, later, to the owners of sailing ships. In the longer and larger scheme of things, geographers and cartographers learned much about the world and its seas from ships’ logs. 

Nowadays sailors often keep logs electronically (samples online provide models and templates), although handsomely bound blank books remain available for the purpose and would probably be the choice of those adventurers hoping eventually to publish writing of their travels. In any case, keeping a record, whether handwritten or electronic, of a boat or ship’s positions and travels is mandatory, like the flight logbook kept by air pilots, and in both cases details are crucial. 

 

No one is obligated, unless by some condition of employment, to maintain a blog, however, and very few of us who do post daily. As the origins of the term indicate, posts reside online rather than in handwritten pages, although more than one blogger keeps electronic files on a personal device. Ephemeral in one sense, in another sense blogs seem to take on a life of their own, with old posts often remaining online long after their authors have moved on to new lives or, in some cases, even died.

 

The first blog I followed was written by a woman I had not yet met at the time but who lived only about ten miles from me. We have since become acquainted in person. Another I discovered (and followed for as long as the blogger kept it) was written in French by a young Chinese woman, a university student from the countryside who eventually earned her master’s degree in French and went to work in the wine industry in China. I learned a lot about China from her blog, both city life and country life. Her parents were my son's age! 

Yet another blogger, a librarian, was a collector of children’s books and caregiver for his elderly parents, and posts on his blog, “Collecting Children’s Books,” stayed close to his subject for the most part, but after a while he joined Facebook and posted more personal stories from his life there, while at the same time keeping up his book blog. News of Peter's unexpected death was announced by his brother on the blogger’s Facebook page, and from the outpouring of grief and condolences there I know I am not the only one who misses the years when he was posting to his blog and sharing his life and its concerns to a limited public on both venues. It all felt very personal. He was a friend I never met.

 

Which reminds me of another way that blogs are different from log books, diaries, and journals: they can be, via reader comments and blogger replies, interactive. Conversations can take place in the space of a blog. This doesn’t seem to happen as often as it did formerly, now that more and less demanding social media have proliferated, but when it does it can be delightful.

 

Of course some blogs, like podcasts, are short-lived. The daughter of an old friend of mine is a podcaster, and from her I learn that only about half of podcasts have any kind of extended life, while slightly over a quarter of them never go past the initial foray. But that is hardly different from anything else in life – learning a musical instrument, taking up a sport, starting a business or a novel. Maintaining enthusiasm for something over the long haul can be tough. And sometimes other enthusiasms come along and take precedence, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  

 

A blog can be personal or commercial or some mix of the two. It can be private and readable only by subscription, perhaps restricted to family members, but most are public and available to anyone who stumbles upon them. In the beginning, part of my own first blog’s stated mission (I have a few lesser blogs where I post other sorts of interests) was to provide year-round connection between my bookstore and my bookstore customers, many of whom visited Northport only for a week or two in the summer, but by now, in its fifteenth year, Books in Northport has taken many unexpected turns and often has nothing at all to do with either books or Northport. Friends back home in northern Michigan and farther afield seem to appreciate my road trip stories, and everyone, it seems, loves the dog tales. 

 

Quite frankly, my artist husband and I have never been gifted at what these days is called monetizing, and sharper, more savvy participants in the online world would probably consider my blogging (in the unlikely event they gave it any thought) a rather pointless waste of time. I’m not selling anything here, and it isn’t as if I’m writing a book (and why am I not?), so why bother?

 

I don’t have a good answer. It’s what I do – at least, it’s some of what I do. This is the fifteenth year I’ve been blogging, and, like keeping a journal (which I’ve been doing for over a year now), like writing letters (which I’ve done all my life), it is a habit. It’s also my ongoing “Kilroy was here” statement, and it allows me to look back occasionally and revisit thoughts and impressions of my earlier self. So it has at least that personal, private value, and I keep at it. What more can I say?

Log-like entry: This morning I’m out in southeastern Arizona, in the high desert, in the ghost town of Dos Cabezas, nearing the end of my “seasonal retirement” until winter comes around again. High winds have been blowing for days, kicking up dust storms from the playa in the Sulphur Springs Valley. Summer birds have returned, and migrating species are passing through. There are clouds in the sky at 6:30 a.m., but rain would be a miracle, although we need rain desperately. 

Soon I will get dressed and go outdoors with my dog, little Peasy, the “dog with issues” (I may post more about those issues soon), and maybe we will scare up a cottontail or two. Later I’ll go to town to do laundry and post this entry to my blog. That’s how my morning looks so far. And a few weeks from now the Artist and I will return to northern Michigan, where I will re-open Dog Ears Books for the season, and the Artist will happily re-inhabit his studio and gallery, and the two of us will spend many hours mowing grass around our old farmhouse, because in June that task admits of little pause. In other words, we will move our life's base of operations from one ancient seabed to another, from the basin and range region of the Southwest to the Great Lakes shoreline.

We won’t always be here, any of us, “here” being far from a singular place as life’s hours fly by, but we’re here now. We’re alive. I’m here in the ghost town this morning, very much alive, and grateful for my present companions in life’s journey.

When Letters -- on Paper -- Were Everything

Reading a diary from before the Civil War, I am struck by the number of letters the young male diarist tells of regularly writing and receiving. His lawyer brother in New Orleans seems to have written to Silas almost every day, and it was a rare day that Silas did not write to James or to Warren or to one of his sisters back home and perhaps also to the editor of a local newspaper. And all his correspondence was, of course, conducted in longhand (Does anyone still say ‘longhand’? Or was it only necessary to make the distinction when secretaries took dictation in shorthand?), with every cranny of space filled.

I have trouble considering anything a book if the words aren't on paper. Likewise a letter. E-mail messages can be important and precious -- I don't pooh-pooh them. But they are not letters. And a "diary" kept in digital format? Really?

 

Silas did not write in his diary every day, but when he did, it was in addition to letters he had also written that same day. The diary he kept for himself; the letters were to and for others. Way back then, without cell phones or e-mail or so-called social media, letters were the way he and others kept in continuous contact with family and friends. His letters to newspaper editors, less frequent, were a way to voice his opinions publicly, as he also did in amateur debates and public addresses.

The debates in which he participated, like his letters, were as much public entertainment as they were communication. Conversation, reading books, and playing musical instruments were ways to pass a quiet lamplit evening at home in those days, and letter-writing was another way, but Silas also made preparation for a debate or for offering a public address by writing longhand notes in the pages of his diary, another occupation that filled his evening hours and also served as preparation to reaching out to others, near and far. Back then, townsfolk and country people regularly traveled to schoolhouses, village halls, and churches for evenings spent listening to debates, public addresses, and sermons. Yes, even sermons were entertainment in those days, with visiting sermonizers critiqued afterward in depth by audience members -- often as much or more for performance quality as for theology, judging from Silas’s diary.

 

In our time, now the third decade of the 21^st century (can you believe it?), a general “felt need” for handwritten correspondence seems almost to have disappeared. We have public forums for our every thought and deed in social media, the instant gratification of texting (often with almost instant replies), and none of it requires paper or stamps, let alone a trip to the post office. But if letters are classed by collectors as ephemera, what can digital exchanges be called? Even if the storage media are somehow preserved, is there any guarantee it will be readable in future? Whereas I can take in my hands Silas’s diary and the handful of private letters tucked into the diary pages, all written over a century and a half ago, and read them as if they were written yesterday, how many of the thoughts and experiences shared on Facebook will anyone be able to visit a century and a half from now?

As thrilling as it is for me to time-travel via Silas’s diary, it is just as thrilling or more so to find a letter in my own mailbox, written to me by a sister or a friend, bearing postage and return address and cancellation that tell of its journey and the thought that went into someone caring enough to reach out to me over hundreds of miles. I can tear the envelope open in haste or slit it carefully with a knife, read the letter immediately or tuck it away and carry it with me to enjoy later – or I can do both, reading it eagerly at once and folding it away to read again an hour later, beginning already to form in my mind the reply that will eventually becomposed and sent off, a personal, intimate, committed-to-paper, taken-time-to-write missive sent to one person alone -- although perhaps to be shared with a partner or friend at the other end, too, because once the letter reaches its destination it belongs to the recipient. The gift has been given.

Then there are the enclosures that letters may contain, as delightful in their way as the letters themselves. This old bit of "ephemera" captured my attention, and I wish I still had new snapshots every week to send with my own letters. Sadly, our photographs are another thing we rarely commit to paper any more.

The biggest problem for me with Sundays is that there is not even the possibility of finding a letter in the mailbox. Monday’s return to mundane, everyday life does not trouble me at all, because the postal carrier may bring me news and thoughts from someone I love.

 

One friend back in northern Michigan who shares my enthusiasm for written correspondence is doing more than writing letters: she has started a movement for slow correspondence called Leelanau Letter Writers. You don’t have to live in Leelanau County, Michigan, to join. There are no membership fees, no meetings. 

You may also elect to join the LLW pen pal group, but you don’t even have to do that. Just let it be your inspiration to write and mail letters. Will you write about what’s really on your mind? What will that be? You need share that only with your recipient. It's that personal. Who will receive the next letter you write? No need to tell me -- just write and send that letter. On paper.

 

Dear Reader, Whoever You May Be

Enter ghost town!

One windy afternoon here in the high desert, while removing membrane from sections of grapefruit for a citrus-based salad, I fell to musing about friendships in my life that have been nurtured by the exchange of handwritten letters. The thought was not unusual, since I am far, far from my Michigan home. Laurie, Ellen, and Leonore, all back in Michigan, came first to mind, friends very much still in my life. 

Laurie and I met on her return from a year in Spain and saw each other occasionally in Kalamazoo, since our husbands were old friends, but only when she left to live in South America and we began writing one another leisurely epistles recounting events in our respective lives did we begin truly to know each other. It was different with Ellen. She and I had worked together before she and her husband moved to Arizona for a year, and writing letters seemed natural to us both. Leonore and I were friends in Kalamazoo, where our children were in school together, but letters between Michigan and Colorado when she and her family were living out West brought us close in a new way. With all three of these friendships, someone I knew in one context went to live far away from the place where we first knew each other, so perhaps part of my interest in writing and being written to was a desire to enlarge my own world.

Sarah investigates cattle path

There is something intimate about a handwritten letter, too, and no doubt some of its value comes from the rarity of such communication in our modern lives. We have no need to write letters, buy stamps, and delay the gratification of knowing our efforts have been received and appreciated, when it is so simple to make a phone call or send a text or an e-mail. Because letters are not necessary, and time to write a letter must be intentionally carved out of a busy life, the friend who takes the time to write adds something valuable to the friendship. 

But — a confession! At least one of my friends understands that my letters to her are just as much self-indulgence as they are gifts to her! In one letter to her years back I quoted from M.F.K. Fisher, writing to one of her correspondents, the passage an admission on Fisher’s part that letter-writing, for her, took the form of an addiction. Yes, there is that, too! So the friends who receive my letters are doing me a great kindness, indulging me for having given way to an overwhelming compulsion.

Ed and I began writing letters to one another in French but have fallen off lately. I remember how long I would labor over letters to my friend Helene in Paris and how pleased I was when she complimented my efforts. Something new this year: thrilled that I am now working too learn Spanish, my friend Laurie encourages me to write to her in Spanish. These missives in other languages lack the spontaneity and ease I feel with English, but writing them affords me a particular sense of accomplishment — and I love the letters I get in return, too.

For many years I had a couple of good friends who never answered my letters in kind but would pick up the phone from time to time, and that worked for us in those relationships. I was uncomfortable making phone calls, and they were not good at writing letters. I still miss the surprise of a call from M., whose present whereabouts are unknown to me, though I have tried repeatedly to locate her. And I cherish the memory of an actual letter from L., the first and last I ever had from her, written in the winter before she died. We were looking forward to a spring visit in Arizona, and when she wrote she recalled our first Arizona visit twenty-three years before. Well, we did have the anticipated second Southwest visit, a lovely time of reconnection. I thought there would be many more to come, but though I can see her no longer, her letter assures me still that our meeting was as important to her as it was to me.

I miss my letters from Helene, another friend whose death hurt my heart, and I miss letters from Annie, too, mon amie philosophe fauve, her ashes now sprinkled at the site of the ancient stone circle of Avebury. What joy it was to find their letters waiting for me in the post office box!

Naturally, I have e-mail correspondence, too. In fact, e-mail letters are already an almost obsolete form, aren’t they? Old-fashioned! But the friends with whom I exchange e-mail messages are mostly of my generation (or are understanding family members a generation younger), and we compose our messages in the manner and with the care we would take to write letters on paper. “Dear Kathy,” I begin, and she begins “Dear Pamela.” Kathy and I pay attention to paragraphs and spelling, and we try to entertain each other with lively description. 

Recently a friend on Facebook sent me a link to a feature article about writers and their diaries and journals. Of all the writers appearing in the story, the one that meant the most to me, the only one that brought a catch to my throat, was Anne Frank. She had never kept a diary before and probably never would have except in hiding; in her normal, prewar life, she was a sociable, outgoing young girl, and had her family been able to escape altogether lands occupied by Nazis, I can easily imagine her writing letters to real living friends back in Holland, not to the imaginary friend “Kitty” she had to invent. When I first read her diary, I was the same age she had been when writing it, and I longed to have been able to exchange letters with the living Anne….

A diary may be hidden away or published in multiple volumes. Writers of private journals intend different ends for them, and it seems to me that the future a writer imagines for his or her diary — whether forever private or completely public — must affect the writing. Some writers wanted their private writings destroyed, but posterity decided otherwise. What would those writers think now, could they return and see their most personal and heartfelt struggles printed and bound and offered for sale in the marketplace?

I have never kept copies of my letters written to friends, and Books in Northport, this blog, now in its eleventh year and public though it is, is the closest I have ever come to keeping a journal of my life with any discipline. My letters, it should surprise no one, often contain more personal thoughts, but the images in this public log give it a dimension the letters lack. 

And what occurred to me over the citrus bowl — the goad to my sitting down and writing this post at all — is that every post published here is like a letter in a bottle, tossed out onto the waves, to be found and read by anyone or no one. When I release it to the world, it is out of my control. Sometimes, as was the case when I was 17 and went with a friend one night a week to a local radio station to take call-in song requests, I wonder if there’s anyone out there in the dark at all. Other times I am surprised to learn how far a specific letter has traveled, on what shore that bottle washed up. 

“Dear reader” is an old-fashioned literary conceit, but I am an old-fashioned person — a bookseller, a reader of print books, and a handwriter of letters to friends. I don’t even have a “smart” phone! All of which is to say, as I struggle for a way to bring this post to a graceful close, that when you read Books in Northport, you are reading as much of a diary as I will ever write, and you are also reading a letter from a friend, whether or not we ever meet face to face. And I do thank you, once again, for indulging me as you do in this strange compulsion.

Sincerely yours, 

P.J.

Simple materials

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