20140907.0850

After a couple of conversations yesterday, I have had occasion to think about the kinds of things we leave behind. It is not a new circumstance for me; I have given some thought before to the stories of the stuff we have (as well as before that), and I have long since read Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, although my own experiences are far different from what the author reports, as have been the events of my life. And they have been different from those people whose papers formed the bases of those conversations I noted, the records of which contained in those papers are now gone away.

Parsing and poring over papers is a delicate process, I know. Were I to pass on now, I know that my wonderful wife would have some...interesting times trying to figure out what to keep and what to discard of the papers I have collected through my life of study and few years of writing. For those who must treat what is left by those who have had longer lives of study and teaching, I imagine that the task is more difficult yet. How can one decide what to keep privately, what to keep publicly, what to donate, and what to discard? Upon what bases are the decisions made?

And when it is known that such decisions have been made, what does it suggest that the choices made are made? When things are hidden, what is it that makes them worth hiding? When they are discarded, what makes them worth being thrown away, cast aside? What makes things worth display, and what does the display show about the one displaying? I find myself asking such questions, wondering about the lives of those concerned and what I now will never know about them. The choice is not mine to make, of course; the materials are not mine to handle at this point, and I have to respect the choices of those whose they are. (I recall some of the readings I have done in CCC, and I remain convinced by them.) But there is a part of me that will burn to know what I will never be able to know on this side of the grave.

I have to wonder who will ask questions of me after I have gone and what answers they will be able to find after I am no longer able to answer them mouth to ear and face to face. What I have left in this webspace will be available, I know, an archive that once established is like to endure long. But of my other writings, I know not what to say. Some, perhaps, will persist; I have a few things in print or on their way to being in print, and someone may at some point read them. Of my journals and other papers, though, what will endure, and what will be done with them, and what will be made of them, I do not know. But it is a thing that I will have to consider, and I think I am not the only one.