past and future

“How can the past and future be,
when the past no longer is,
and the future is not yet?
As for the present, if it were always present
and never moved on to become the past,
it would not be time, but eternity.”

~ Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book 11

The unrelenting marathon of professional life finds some redemption in the complexities of service and curatorial projects. Indeed, preferring productive and supportive work, I’m not in this for the palace intrigues or the ladder rungs. The prize at the unknown opening of the maze must lead to something much better. And the route has to tunnel beneath the careful consistency of relational and physical accomplishments. Holding firmly to my ethic of “bloom where you’re planted,” in addition to managing and facilitating a full-service department single-handedly, there is no shortage of projects. Just as well, the satisfaction in producing successions of positive results serves as both motivator and sanity factor. Josemaría Escrivá famously said that vocation is the greatest gift of grace, and a vocation surely has many related facets. I still strongly believe in the work I’m doing, bringing out unique archival materials that inform many- including me. In order to generate effective and accurate metadata, varying degrees of thoughtful analysis are needed- from basic verification, to skimming, to comparative reading. All the while, there’s always an eye on time-efficiency.

A project I pulled to the fore, amidst my complete overhaul of the archives I’ve most recently created (having set up archives throughout the State, over the years) is a large array of rare, local serial collections. As much as researchers love them, the service end of things is replete with indifference about newspapers and periodicals. I happen to really enjoy the writing styles and advertising graphics of eras past. To me, the materials are captivating- essentially history in real time. For each time I bring out digitized ephemera, I hear from grateful audiences who devour the contents. And with the researchers, I’m fascinated to see what was, leafing up to later dates, then back to earlier years and decades. Through all my inventorying and indexing, I’m better able to connect people with information. And it happens. About two months ago, I sought out and processed a unique run of a cultural periodical, printed on newsprint, from the 1970s. It had been locally warehoused. Shortly afterwards, a visiting researcher asked whether I knew of that exact title, as she and her mother had both published in it. Bringing out the alkaline boxes of flattened papers, my guest was elated. This sort of serendipity is not uncommon. I can merely glance heavenwards, wink, and keep up the good work (and the good instincts).

While in the throes of sifting and sorting piles of antique newspapers which had been migrated from one library building’s attic to another’s basement, I found several items that I knew would fit perfectly in another city’s archives. It so happens I had created their archives more than twenty years ago, and remember their contents very well. Eager to deliver the gems, I carefully reinforced the 19th century broadsheets in a portfolio, and made a daytrip of my errand. En route, it occurred to me that while I had maintained some contact with that particular library, I hadn’t been inside the place in a long time. A life of continuous, hard work leaves very thin margins for respite. Trying to offset exhaustion with journaling and unstructured Sundays have provided ways to continue puddle-jumping, refraining from looking too far. Indeed, I brought the historic items to grateful recipients I’d never met before, in a building I hadn’t visited in twenty-three years. The place still looked the same, and it was heartening to see the calligraphed sign still displayed which I had made for them back in 2000. The last time I’d been in the place, I had completed major projects; it was shortly after my completion of graduate school. This time, I crossed their threshold after having achieved and endured numerous professional scenarios and challenges. My impression of this brief visit wasn’t an experience I expected- at the same time both strange and familiar. After quietly leaving the building, I walked to a nearby church to reflect, knowing the doors were open.

Again, I thought of Escrivá’s words- whose books I’ve known only in recent years- and how he told his readers to ask themselves who they sought when they approached the Sacrament. He said, “Are you seeking yourself, or are you seeking God?” That hour of contemplative intention, immediately following my strange visit with a past place of employment, was just the right instinctual balance. As much as archival work serves here-and-now access, and conservation for future use, the interpreting of raw material magnetizes our compasses toward the past. This week’s projects send me back to earlier projects in earlier places quite easily. All the jobs we’ve had, with our schools, communities, our various adventures dotting our timelines- good and bad- illustrate each of our personal histories. These stages along our pilgrimages form our perspectives. An individual is essentially a living time-capsule, replete with ethereal archives. Life and art mirroring each other amidst my wakeful hours, I wonder at the human version of deaccession and preservation. Tireless work makes for tireless thinking about work, especially all the pending projects. Insomnia tangles with my strategizing of the department I manage, and that slides into when I report to work, so that I can implement the ideas. And with my cultivated and critical senses and skills, the work always gets done.

Integral to the processing of historic serials is their preparation for longterm storage, retrieval, and future digitization. I’ve been doing all of these things, including a lot of the scanning, after flattening and even very gently repairing torn newsprint. No matter how disciplined my adherence to tasks-at-hand, it’s impossible to avoid reading from my discoveries. Indeed, the more informed I am of the content, the better my analyses for researchers’ queries. And, admittedly, the narratives and illustrations of bygone eras- be it the 1990s or the 1790s- are compelling in their vocabularies. Newspapers, in particular, are frozen moments with commentary. The paper strata themselves have distinctive stories, in their very ingredients and manufacturing. Handling and reading really go together.

There are embossed textures in pre-1840 cotton rag content paper, retaining an impressive amount of strength. Latter 19th and early 20th century newspapers were largely very cheaply made, using bleached wood pulp, resulting in thin and highly acidic surfaces. Depending upon how the paper has been stored, I’ve seen darkening that has the appearance of having been burnt. Scanning this type of material saves the content. Rewrapping the deteriorated pages, with enormous care, the telltale rattling sound attests to the papers’ embrittlement. The other day, while checking my work, it occurred to me how a computer screen can give digitized, antiquated text a similar look to present-day electronic text. Past and present become easily juxtaposed this way, but the genuine article has the intrinsic aspects of authenticity. Artifacts carry memorable content, but also the physical objects also have memory. Among my regular patrons is a researcher who writes about religious communities and biographies. Having just flattened, repaired, boxed, and inventoried a run of regional newspapers beginning in 1822, I brought him several early issues as a sampling for perusal. He was clearly impressed and inspired, spontaneously reading various paragraphs to me, from the cotton-based 200 year-old newspaper, in surprisingly good condition. We took turns reading to each other, talking about what we read as archaisms. A moment worth remembering in the life of doing this work. This fellow was astonished at how close these unique papers were to being discarded. Past is pulled to present, and projected ahead to future endeavors, in the search for knowledge and context.

world of our own

“Close the door, light the light
We're stayin' home tonight
Far away from the bustle and the bright city lights
Let them all fade away, just leave us alone
And we'll live in a world of our own

We'll build a world of our own that no one else can share
All our sorrows we'll leave far behind us there
And I know you will find there'll be peace of mind
When we live in a world of our own.”

~ The Seekers, A World of Our Own

redeeming the time

Even in quarantine, there remains a need for safe refuge. And I am bearing in mind how there are woefully so many that are without places of residence, along with those without employment- each in a personal state of emergency. As for my continuum, it is through tentative and part-time work, although my thoughts and efforts are occupied on a full-time basis. Over these pandemic months, I’ve been able to accomplish about 75% of my work from my apartment. Albeit in a small living space, it’s been important to keep the “work work” away from my writing table. The two areas are at opposite corners of my apartment- even using two different laptop computers. Yet still, after the intensities of each day, there must be time and space to decompress. And the recollective and regrounding time lasts well into the night- long after the whole building has gone to sleep, and long after the drunken rowdies from the nearby bar’s outdoor operations have driven away (under the influence, no less). A few midnights ago, I pencilled this on a slip of paper: Even in quarantine, we seek refuge. Tranquility is not automatically part of our shut-in situations.

patience and pace

Every meaningful idea and project takes time and patience to develop. Central to the frustration of the present societal standstill is how the paces of time remain unrelenting. If hurry up and wait wasn’t bad enough, now we have something more like, it must but it can’t. Procedure and impatience never played well together. As children, our superiors reprimanded many of us for our impatience; as adults, many of us must chafe under the impatience of our superiors. Ponder that bit of irony. For this occasion, I’ll single out the professional archival work I’ve been accomplishing for the past twenty-two years through projects and public service. My mentor in graduate school used to repeat to us that we archivists should always be ready to educate colleagues around us about what our work entails- particularly librarians and administrators. Conserving, curating, interpreting, and managing original documents and artifacts is meticulous work. Doing the work methodically and correctly actually saves time, so that it will not have to be re-done later. The best stewardship means choosing not to cut corners, thinking of the benefits to be derived by future researchers. It takes time for any organic entity to bear fruit, and my two decades of experience have shown me how true this is. And the benefits are well worth the hard work- with this attentive labor requiring equal parts of patience, drive, steadfastness, and sensitivity to the subject matter.

archival processing

In September 2009, I seized upon an unusual opportunity that very few archivists ever encounter. After years of taking on and completing a number of regional archival and preservation projects, I was alerted by a family member of the city’s newspaper founder that the company had been resold and the building housing all publishing operations was being gutted. Rushing downtown on my bicycle and descending to the old building’s sub-basement, I saw large piles and stacked boxes and bags of unorganized photographic negatives. Being both a career photographer as well as an archivist, I recognized the mounds of cellulose fragments as camera originals, and very likely a century of Greater Portland history in primary form. Through the buzz of removal service workers, I found the supervisor and asked him about the film. He found it curious that I wanted the discarded negatives, even after I told him about my livelihood. “You want this stuff? You gotta take it away this week, or it’s all going to a smelter,” he said, evidently referring to the silver content in the film. Speaking for my institution, and with the newspaper founder’s elderly granddaughter ready to support my rescue, I said “That’s not going to happen. I’ll take it all.” With the descendent’s extremely valuable support, the ownership and copyrights were legally cleared in favor of my institution and department, and all the film was moved out of the gutted sub-basement to a temporary offsite workspace for me to use as I began organizing this massive accession. And there began my odyssey of salvaging and rescuing what has turned out to be a priceless trove of more than a half-million unique photo images, taken between 1936 and 2004.

The process is surely worth its own series of essays, but for the moment it suffices to say that my life’s experiences served me well, marching into this project undaunted, using and defending the best practices of my field at every turn. It took three years to analyze, organize, and arrange all the pieces of film; during that first-pass I began creating the control document- known as a finding-aid. I examined over a million exposures. The second pass has been the highly critical descriptive treatment, which I merged with rehousing the images into non-acid alkaline enclosures. The process is painstaking, even at my level of dedication and devotion, and a great deal of research has been needed so that these images (which had been right on the precipice of a smelter!) could be brought out to audiences. I’ve been making productive use of these lockdown times by turning up my paces with this vast project, having fewer interruptions, focusing on the digitization of the most informative of these images. I’m carefully identifying all locations and coordinates, including building addresses, personal names, and intersections, remembering how researchers value pictures of streets and structures. The best of the images have intrinsic value, but that value is inestimably enhanced with through descriptive information providing context for the subjects.

the phenomenon of archival photographs

When I rescued all the film discarded by the newspaper, I had a fairly good idea concerning the extent of the manual and intellectual strain that would have to follow. Despite knowing that physical space for processing and storage was going to be a problem, the urgency of securing the images was my greater concern. And it must be written here that as clearly as I recall the trash removers’ remarks about smelters, I also remember looking at those sorry mountains of scattered negatives and visualizing the completed work in my mind’s eye. I’m almost there. To be able to advance this project on a daily basis, on a shoestring and without proper facilities, I fronted my own money for some equipment, generated a grant, and recruited a team of volunteers to assist with the cataloguing and rehousing. And the unexpected joy in this stewardship is how the project began to take on a community aspect.

My hand-picked assisting volunteers have been senior citizens with a flair for history and memory. They remember many of the subjects in the photos, and our work together has been as satisfying as its been productive. We’ve had to use a work table in a public area, which has meant many passers-by have been watching the project take shape. People naturally ask questions, and the years of banter have forged a fellowship of appreciation for preserving local history. Everyone has stories, and I’ve been glad to listen. Such splendid intangibles cannot be properly bullet-listed in annual reports. Spirited friendships are for the archives in our hearts.

As the reckoning with quarantining and having to work from home set in, many of my coworkers found themselves either furloughed or scrambling to keep busy. Capitalizing on this productive solitude, I brought access to my thousands of image scans from the negatives, plus that priceless finding-aid, to my dining table so that I could begin building substantial digital archives. As with the initial processes, digitization and accurate interpretation is equally demanding. But these are necessary results, fruits of the labors of salvaging and preserving, and respecting the historicity of these treasures. Each uploaded image has been prefaced by my analysis and delicate scanning. More often than not, I confirm precise locations with maps and city directories- even when I know places from my own memory. Each image has stories to be respected.

Just as elements of serendipity have surfaced throughout this project, from the initial pass through the researching stages, this unique archive brought to life during pandemic times has accumulated a serendipitous audience. As the digital image collections have been growing in substance and coverage, viewership has been exponentially increasing. For the past several months, I’ve been hearing from hundreds of grateful browsers from places far away from Maine. Local residents, ex-pats, and admirers love the photos; and they tell me about their connections to the subjects. Most are people I’ve never seen before, and would not have been among my walk-in traffic. The comments are profoundly touching. This inadvertent and large new audience gives me a lot encouragement, and the sum total confirms to me that I’ve been doing the right things in the right ways- from the day I saw those acetate heaps in the gutted building. These images, these frozen moments in the lives of places and people, are indeed meaningful to many. The affections of the viewing public are equal to mine.

Among the many things I’ve been learning over the past 5 months is about the sustaining power of nostalgia. People everywhere are shut away from the lives they had before last spring. The months since have been filled with news that is at once grim, disappointing, and often tragic. Future hopes of cures, vaccinations, opportunities, socializing in person, and economic recoveries are too far away to predict. And in our natural inclination to dream, amidst closed doors we look to the past. More precisely, we look for comfort to what we like about the past. People tell me about the stores and dining places dear to their remembrances, and because I’ve so carefully catalogued these businesses by names and addresses, I post to the online archive the beloved department stores, small shops, diners, coffeehouses, and restaurants of Portland. I’ve been adding schools, streets, parks, and aerial views- all to the delight of many. It ceaselessly amazes me to see how a still image can ignite emotional and detailed stories from people far and wide. I digitized and posted a photo of a popular doughnut shop, and another of a delicatessen- and streams of comments followed, regaling me about what everyone loved to order, summer jobs, school days, and family traditions. When I post photos of stores, people tell me about what they bought at these places. It’s really wonderful. At the sight of a picture of a furniture store, a man told me that he had no pictures of his father’s store from decades ago. Well I found it and posted it, to his great joy. Into people’s frustrated quarantines, I’m providing some consolation through their memories, using archival imagery.

Louis Armstrong gets a Maine lobster.

worlds of our own

When an anticipated turn is undetectable, good news can come from reminders of the past visiting our present. Reflective personal writing and professional life both cause me to comprehend this; often the two spheres are juxtaposed. I can certainly understand my corresponding library patrons just as I could with years of walk-in seekers. Even the most serious researchers want to reminisce. And I accompany all of them, occasionally blending in names and locations from my own memories. As for the negatives- especially the later images, having been a journaling local and an active participant in this city, I’ve enriched descriptive metadata that would never have been gleaned from minimalist microfilms. As an archivist, the facts must be verifiable, and yet I've discovered the crossroads of archival processing and a kind of documentary narration. I'm able to provide descriptive context from my own memory, giving roots to the subjects when they are missing.

I was present when the photos were taken, took one of them myself, and personally knew the people in the photos. In addition, having found these photos, I am able to document the connections between the social resource and its founding church, to tell the most complete story possible. It's important to be the one that can AND will do this sort of thing.

As we do what we can do, and refrain from what we can’t do, having worlds of our own will be integral to survival. I do not consider nostalgic viewers of archives as different from me. It is as though thousands of individuals, each with a camera, are pointed at the same locations. Obviously, the differences are in our ages, backgrounds, personal interests, and how each of us look at life. While I’ve been assembling archives out of the film I rescued, diligently entering coordinates, names, and dates, I’ve also been reconstructing a world that is gone yet still remembered by many. The crisp and captioned photographs are sharpening countless memories. People are telling me they had forgotten how this store and that store were across the same street; they ask me “what’s at so-and-so’s address now?” The photos are sparks that rekindle vibrant recollections, well worth recording. Photography has unique ways of saying, “yes, this was true,” and “it was really there, and so were you.” In that sense, archival photographs are evidence, stopping time in the click of a one-hundredth-of-a-second’s lens shutter. It is a phenomenon that is part of my every day.

“Joy is the serious business of heaven,” wrote C. S. Lewis as the narrator in Letters to Malcolm. Amidst reading and hearing about the cheers of recalling things cherished, I am in a humbled wonder at the effects of the pictures. And it is very serious business, too, to be accurate and thorough. By presenting these archives, I am “giving back” the histories of those whose existing imagery was through what they try to remember. Anecdotes faded and blurred by the mists of time are sharpened. In an archivally metaphysical way, I’ve been rebuilding demolished places that are missed by many. During the voyage of tracking through seven decades of negatives, I saw how many churches this city had, which are long since torn down- and quietly as a subseries, I created a complete visual database of houses of worship. These are vanished places that are both historically very interesting and also very dear to many. Once again, it is a vital role to be the one who can and will do this sort of thing. Treating the joys as serious business has generated a heartening appreciation that exceeds anything I’ve experienced prior to this past April. There is more to do, and there are moments to be seized while possible- even in the unpredictable not-knowing. The worlds of our own may include grand stores and luncheonettes, Victorian railroad stations, houses and neighborhoods, repair shops, pastries, holidays, events, celebrities, relatives and friends, children’s street games, and big snow storms. We have these worlds, and the more they inspire and instruct, the more they are worth cultivating and conserving.

survival

“There is a reason, well known to Job, why
even good men must drink the bitter cup of temporal adversity:
in order that the human spirit may test its mettle
and come to know whether it loves God
with the virtue of trusting faith and for God’s own sake.”

~ Saint Augustine, Civitate Dei, Book 1, chapter 9.

surviving

Wakeful nights are generally unlit. The grainy grey crepuscule misses the advantage of critical navigational visibility. Pacing my darkened apartment, I notice the dormant windows of the nine-storey building across the street. Or perhaps they are not all dormant. Others might be awake and about, in their respective shadowlands. Amidst the carbon dimness, snippets and scrapbooks of the mind reopen. Decades of scenes and words return to my thoughts in astonishingly categorized compendia. Being threatened on a New York street during a work day of delivering groceries when I was 16. Rewording what I should’ve said during a lecture I gave last week. Noticing the books I’ve collected and wondering where they will go when I’m gone. Opening a drawer of pencils and pens, slowly.

Years ago, I worked with a former Navy photographer who had a million stories. One that stuck to me was about another photographer he worked with, a fellow who worked tirelessly, and eventually died on the job in the print room. My twenty year old self found the death horrifying, but John thought the setting was even more shocking. A frequent recollection comes from a more recent job, at a college. I often ate lunch with the chaplain, who was hilarious, yet grimly serious, and extremely energetic. Admiringly, I asked him what kept him going; he instantly responded, “Fear!” By that, he meant a fear of being unable to accomplish all that was required of him. A fear of inefficiency and failure. Achievement is frequently synonymous with survival.

Having recalled and gleaned collected anecdotes, the dusky scrapbooks close, and my steps circuitously return to more attempts at repose. Marveling at all I’ve seen and experienced, my sense of intact self-survival is offset by doubts about misdirected turns. What have I learned? As I wonder about surviving, my thoughts turn to preservation and how I’ve been tenaciously conserving archives and books as a career. My colleagues and I go to great lengths to safeguard the conveyance of past and present into the future. Archives are assessed for their informational value, and thus interpreted in their indexing. We want these artifacts and their respective contextual documentation to survive.

Why preserve knowledge? Does it have a future in this throwaway wilderness eviscerated by impatience? Do I genuinely survive? The wakeful questions persist. A vital aspect of an archivist’s work is to assess material for its authenticity and relevance. The invisible side of painstaking conservation is what our profession calls “the fine art of destruction.” Both parallels demand scrupulous conscientiousness. Imagine a human mind’s “records retention policy.” In order to survive, and survive well, there are burdensome excesses to discard and otherwise surrender in favor of what is worth preserving. Perhaps that is built into the continuum of personal survival. But as with archives, the process must be worth the vigilance.

purpose

What is the purpose of survival, and what good is it? Persistently, achievement does not surface, and things appear to be adrift. I’ve found stagnation to be synonymous with erosion. Seeing no dividends from the promises I have tenaciously banked, naturally I am brought to question my investments. What is their worth? Will they mature in value and remunerate? It is easy to absorb the contagion of a popular culture that obsesses over “metrics,” “outcomes,” and “monetization.” Definitions of what is “redeemable” change with the rapidity and fickleness of software upgrades. Wondering about the value of survival also causes me to question the effort and its emphases. Why endure, when cost and “collateral damage” are so steep- or to borrow another corporate nugget, “unsustainable?”

Goals must be re-examined, to justify all it requires to get there- let alone to tread water. Perhaps this perspective demonstrates my exposure to that very outcome-based culture that causes me to bristle. Ancient and profounder wisdom teaches me to savour the journey. The insomnia-riddled present questions all my tireless striving. Why excel and exert as I have all these years? Amidst the piles of wakeful thoughts are musings about why I’d done so well in school and worked so hard at all my jobs. What of that “permanent record” we were all warned about during 12th grade? Countless exams, research papers, projects, and presentations; where have they brought me? They are no more of a foundation than last week’s time-sheet. Can a mind weep over what was- and what might’ve been? Where does the road turn?

survival is longing

Only a few minutes’ reflection brings esteemed survivors to mind. I have personally known survivors of wars, the Holocaust, near-fatal illnesses, severe accidents, and various traumas. Their examples and insights have made deep impressions upon me. Thinking of these individuals brings me to recognize that built into survival is a driving sense of longing. Perhaps the forces that fuel the spirit of survival contain hope that is certain as to the transcendence of misery. Survivors entrust their aspirations to an innate knowing that their trials do not have the last word.

My days witness endangered treasures. Facilitating and teaching history, I’ve versed myself in the critical dates and sites of destruction, repurposing, and transition. On my daily errands, my mind’s eye sees what once stood upon today’s empty lots, malls, and cheap sheet-metal postmodern structures. Privately, I see the deterioration caused by ailing health among loved ones and colleagues. Even parents, whom I habitually continue to perceive as mighty and everlasting, look uncharacteristically fragile. Memory has come to include places and people that predate me, affecting a past as powerful as the dynamic present itself. An archivist that is spiritually awake is never off-duty.

Striving, and thus surviving, my abiding ache is to see fulfillment. It is as much a personal as a professional longing, and long overdue. Yearning indeed drives survival. Experience and knowledge sown must come to fruition. I have inherited portions of the survival legacies of many, and for that mere sake the squandering of such treasure is an unbearable prospect. A notable survivor, St. Augustine, wrote in the late-4th century with insights that read today as strikingly modern. The north African Christian leader and philosopher wrote through his own survival. Trying to make sense of the highly complex mystery of layered thought, he distinguished the realm of mind as differentiated from that of memory. Augustine observed how we can remember sadness with a mind that is gratefully glad. In exemplary Eastern fashion, spirit is shown to reside deeply within the viscera:

“Surely this does not mean that memory is independent of the mind. Who could say that? No doubt, then, memory is as it were, the stomach of the mind, whereas gladness and sadness are like sweet and bitter food. When they are entrusted to the memory, they are as if transferred to the stomach and can there be stored; but they cannot be tasted.”
~Confessions, ch.10.

How or whether I survive to see better circumstances may be a question from which I’m best off disengaging. Perhaps the very aspect of the unknown as it concerns the future, its very open-endedness, will help me survive for whatever length of time is necessary. With my sense of what archival records-management means, choosing only to preserve what is vital, a great deal of faith is needed. Better than to survive is to survive intact. I know merely to press on, in spite of poor visibility. Part of that unknowing is my astonishment at how I’ve survived this far. Through this mortal life, alas, the simple answers are outnumbered by complex questions. There isn’t a wakeful night or an essay to solve them all, but as the sun rises there comes another try.

living history, part 2

“History teaches everything,
including the future.”

~ Alphonse de Lamartine

(Upper 2 photos- le Château de Cormatin, Burgundy - France:
the author Alphonse de Lamartine's retreat.)



At the intersection of living and livelihood, walking and working cross-pollinate. The logistics we experience daily that run our businesses and institutions can even affect our household routines. One day, after years in the photo business, I noticed how much my kitchen and my darkroom (on opposite sides of town) resembled each other. I fold my laundry in the same way I folded clothes in a factory I once worked in, and my efficiency as a prep cook resembles a food service job I had while in school. Academics, teaching, and archival work influence how I read. My favorite books are equipped with my own crafted indexes. I’ve rebound many of my books to make them sturdier. While awakening others to the study of history, I’m stoking my own studying fires, well aware of the value of historic research. And reflection, contemplation, along the voyage of faith. How does this continuum known as the pilgrimage of trust on earth appear through an archivist’s eyes? The ancient psalmist, in his searching of God’s vastness, prayed “search me and know my heart.” He inquired to be sought. In this sense, to research is to verify, to confirm, and to strengthen: Confirmet cor tuum. At this prospect, there is always energy to continue learning and preserving truths to heart.

Just this week, I’ve completed another round of teaching the conservation of books. Another class filled with animated learners. Now in my 12th year in preservation education, it interests me to consider how these topics continue to be so popular. The latter 19th century and early 20th saw an enormous proliferation of documentation and publication, albeit upon largely embrittling material. Thus, there is plenty to preserve- in their original, assuredly readable forms. These primary artifacts will continue to be sought after, as evidentiary records that can be authenticated. Archives are as informative as they are evidence- of lives lived, of commerce, of transit. Those of us that journal are creating an archival continuum. We want our testaments to last; we want what we love to be permanent and known. And we collect. One of my current projects involves processing an author’s archives. Unpacking his boxes, I saw that he saved his licence plates, and filed them along with his passports and military medals. Along with a belief that we naturally seek our origins, I think we are all collectors. Most everyone loves to collect, in various ways, and have others admire what they cherish. At the same time, I see how many reach the point at which they desire to give what is cherished, so it will be preserved- with the narrative context that gives significance to substance. For an archivist, it is the transferral of provenance; in more human terms, we become living witnesses for one another. Which tattered tomes are worth our resources to preserve?

(A retired history teacher gave me this beautiful typewriter which he used throughout his career.)



In some profound ways, the first day of my graduate education initiated the rest of my life. My road to a double-majored masters began with an after-work evening course. Dr. Cole looked at all of us and said, “Why study history?” Getting everyone’s attention, he continued with, “If anything, study history for personal development.” Of course, I wrote this down in my notebook. We were taught from the standpoint that , “there is no phenomenon without history,” and that by organizing facts and events, narratives emerge that meaningfully inform. Historiography explores the uses of the past, whether that means civilizations, battles, philosophical thought, or one’s very life. An awareness of history’s importance is one thing, but it’s quite another to elucidate why some elements of the past continue to matter. It interests me to consider why we relight lamps long languished in storage, and what treasures are sought in the search. What brings a soul to reflect upon that which no longer exists- or upon something that continues albeit in a barely recognizable form? Probing the past must not fall into the trap of dwelling upon it. Contemplative searching leads to an understanding of what is at one’s threshold.

With journaling as historic writing, it is possible to identify instances in which I’ve altered a course in light of past lessons learned. Any knowledge can be proven, as questions are posed of its findings. Consider past circumstances from which to steer clear. Think of the good habits and attributes to build upon. Weigh the worthwhile things that currently exist. Hoping not to repeat old mistakes, I equally hope not to be jaded by the lesser leftover impressions from affiliations, relationships, and expectations. How shall we live beyond our stories? How would we like today to be remembered? As the Holy Spirit breathes life and redeeming use into recollections, I become able to consider the good purpose in what I have so indelibly retained. But it is surely a discipline that demands exercise and care. As I prepare for future journeys, anticipating the merging of interior and exterior geographies, history compels me in a forward direction. What is past may be touched upon, though it is not to be gripped in favor of what tangibly and presently exists.