burning the archive

i’ve taken an unintended hiatus from this newsletter for the past couple months. since the election, maybe? i’ve written a half dozen issues and then left them in my drafts. everything seems unnecessary, words said better or more effectively elsewhere. it might just be the winter doldrums, or it might be self-awareness, or the existential feeling that words might have their limits.

in the meantime, i finally read Fahrenheit 451 for the first time, thanks to my friend Rebecca peer pressuring me. it is, quite simply, beautiful and terrifying! (in case you, like me, think of it as “that book about book-burning,” I beg you to re-read it.)

there’s a scene where one of the characters talks about why books have been made illegal, and what matters about those that remain:

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has PORES. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s MY definition, anyway. TELLING DETAIL. FRESH detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

“So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality.”

When I was younger, my mother told me that in her thirties she took a decade worth of journals, drove the town dump, and threw them all in. This enraged me when I first heard about it. I took it as personally as though she’d wrecked my own writing — what right did she have to deny me the record of who I came from? She couldn’t explain it, though she tried: something about needing to start over. I was too young at the time to understand what she could possibly mean.

Fast forward my college graduation. I came home from college to discover a dumpster parked in the driveway. My father pointed to it with glee and told me, “Everybody gets to pick something to put in the dumpster!” At this point I’d already begun to suspect my father was losing his mind, though none of us knew how grim it was about to get. I dealt with this by getting in my car and driving to Virginia to start a writing program, and hoped that by the time I returned, everything would be back to normal.

Instead, my father threw many, many things in the dumpster. It was, relatively speaking, one of the less upsetting things he did in this time period, so it didn’t occur to me for years to wonder what had gotten thrown out in the Great Purge.

At some point in my mid twenties, I realized with a gasp what must have been thrown into that dumpster: the gargantuan cardboard box in the back of my childhood bedroom closet, the one that was full of every journal I’d meticulously kept from age 6 to age 20. It seems small to me now, but at the time it was devastating. I felt like the record of my life (so far) had been erased without my even noticing. All that detail, all those pores of the face of my life, gone.

so why is it that the absence of those journals now gives me an overwhelming sense of relief?

Maybe it’s the release of the weight of the past. The relief of having the permission to let the present matter just as much as what came before. Maybe it assures me that though I loved my child self, I’ll love my current self even more. Maybe it lets me stop clinging to memories and put faith in the ones I’m making now.

It turns out I really am the only one who decides who I am and how I’m going to live my life. There is a record, but it’s not a prescription. You can still change the story anytime you want to. (Cue Natasha Bedingfield.)

So I’ll never read my mother’s journals, and no one (except perhaps a distant, confused junkyard worker) will ever read mine. The record is gone! They could be ashes, for all I know! It doesn’t mean we’ve ceased to exist.

One of the things that surprised me about Fahrenheit 451 was that for all its reflections on why books matter, it simply isn’t precious about books themselves. In fact, just the opposite!

“Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.” 

There is nothing magical in them, at all! Astounding. Devastating and freeing. It’s the stitching that matters, and the stitching can outlive the books, can outlive us, even!

Maybe this is moving to me this month because I’m staring down the barrel of another round of novel revisions and am SICK of this urge in myself to continually try to make books. Give it a rest!!! And yet I want to get up close to the pores of life, I guess. By book or by crook. One way or another.