Papers

I was listening to a story on the radio the other day about Justice Blackmun’s papers. The woman being interviewed was Linda Greenhouse from the New York Times. She was asked whether or not we would we have access to as many justices ‘Papers’ in the future with the advent of email and electronic media.

She said she thought he was ununusual to have kept so many of his papers. Bill and I laughed, thinking of the dozens of boxes of papers that I have spent the last year helping aleta sort through.

Why do people keep stuff? Why do they insist on holding on to hotel bills, theatre ticket stubs, memos to their bosses, fliers they pick up while walking down the street? As I’ve often bemoaned the number of things that George kept, I often wonder, what did he hope would happen to all this stuff?

Was the impulse merely a bureaucratic one? A desire to have a record of his words in case his reason for being for challenged? Or was it existential? Sort of an “I write, I collect therefore I exist?”

I can’t help but think of all the people all over the world confronted with the documents that are evidence of their loved ones hopes,wishes, dreams and most of all words. That piece of paper signifies the time he got in the conflict with customs over the suitcase full of fruit? Or that traffic ticket was the only one he ever received and I remember him standing in court fighting it to the end.

How many people think that their loved ones papers were important enough to preserve? How many people spent years holding onto boxes of old words, or trying to convince an archive that these papers really do signify something, the pathways of one individual in some bureaucratic system. What happens to all those papers that end up in libraries when no historian enters the right key word sequence to bring them back to life.