I wrote this in my diary one evening. Enjoy!
Apr. 18th, 2016
I suppose I can be just as proud and amazed to be able to truthfully write that date, sitting in a bright, many-windowed room with the glowing screen of a computer before me and the hum of a digital printer beside as I think the people two hundred years ago should have been to be able to truthfully write “Dec. 20th, 1816” with brown ink on thick paper.
Mercer, my brother, age eighteen, brought out an old, old, book with brown, faded pages and the binding no longer existent. He sat down on the couch beside me, asking,
“Have I ever shown you this?” He had to hold it carefully, and, every once in a while as we went through it, to take out whole sheafs of paper and replace them, right-side-up.
All the writing was in one hand, with beautiful curving script and a tendency to discard clarity for style. We spent the last hour or more poring over this ancient manuscript, and we are convinced we have found a treasure.
It was two different notebooks, one appearing to belong to a certain Philip Marsh, the other to a man whose name we could not decode; but the writing was all in the same hand. There was some math, copywork, Bible verses, sermon notes, diary entries and an ongoing history of births, deaths, marriages, baptisms, first sermons and major historical events. This last was of the keenest interest to us, and we read it ponderingly, marveling at the age of the document. The dates of this chronicling of events spanned from 1763 to 1845. Alas, I will not have the privilege of crossing from one century to the next in my lifetime.
I cannot hope to have a discoverer, two hundred years down the road. I am glad - overjoyed; the full impact has not yet been realized - to be that discoverer for someone else. Obviously that was what he had in mind - the importance of documentation, because future generations will otherwise lose the information. He thought that the words we held in our hands were precious, needed, necessary, and so he took valuable time and even more valuable paper to write it all down. He wrote it for the reader.
I will not, most likely, have any reader other than myself. But I put the words down because I believe it is of utmost importance; because I know it will be enjoyed and useful. I think, I dream, and then I write with a purpose. He and I are the same. We put thought into words, we carefully form them on the paper, we read them over to ensure they are the right ones - the ones we intended to say - and then we close the book, put it away, stand up, and continue to think and dream; we speak to the people around us, we laugh and remember yesterday, we lead vibrant and FULL lives. Only a portion ever gets down on paper, and by that snippet the reader must try to recreate us, to imagine us into being once more. O reader! The thought of you gives us joy, makes us ponder, replenishes the material. Be what you are to the full. We want you to invest in us like we invested in you. Think of the time it took us to write to you. The time it takes to dream about us and preserve us is not too much!
In this respect I write to myself as reader, not imagining I will have one to call my own.
And so instead I write to the man of the eighteen hundreds. I live in an exciting time, O 1800. The days are so full of fascinations and ideas that when I find your words, written on parchment strange to me in a pen stranger, I look at it, I exclaim, I imagine I am intrigued, that my life has changed, that this discovery will make me study it for years, and then I put it down, walk up the stairs, undress (I don’t wear a corset, although I wish I could and probably should), hop into bed, fall asleep, and forget about you, about your writing, and about your book, for there are very few things in the world of my day that are intended to hold the attention for more than a few hours, and there are plenty of things intended to snatch the attention away from what is good and place it somewhere else. O 1800 Christian, you thrive. We of the twenty-first century are turning belly-up in the waters of technology (I’ll explain that later) and comfort.
The hour is late. The human race of 2016 is used only to going to bed because they are grumpy. I and my family try to buck the trend and instead go when we are tired. Good night! (And think of what I do afterwards.)