September 1938:

One of the individuals whose papers we collect is the great avant-garde film-maker and all-around genius Maya Deren. Among those papers is a short diary, written in the form of letters addressed to herself as “Dear A.E.”, as in “Alter Ego.” At the time these letters were written, Deren was 21 years old and attending Smith College, from which she would earn a Master’s Degree in literature. She had recently divorced her husband, whom she had married at the age of 18. She begins the first diary entry/letter this way (all punctuation and capitalization is hers):

“Dear A.E. (Alter-Ego):

Because I cannot think clearly unless I am trying to express something; because I am not positive unless I am trying to convert; because I cannot express unless I feel I am expressing to someone; because this promises to be a year of loneliness and because I must train myself to be able to be alone and yet be something...thinking, expressing, hoping, convincing, analyzing...in short...a live human being...so I dedicate these letters to you. I will try to tell you what I fear so that I shall know myself; I will try to tell you what I want so that I shall know myself; I will try to tell you what I plan so that I will plan….I will try to tell you so that all these impressions, all these nostalgias, all these vague and troubling desires, all these fears will become real in my mind and so becoming specific and actual...I will be able to deal with them better.”

1620-1660:

It’s not surprising that the diaries of the New England Puritans contain daily, ongoing confessions to God of their sins, whether actually committed or only desired. But a Puritan’s diary was also a workshop of self-reflection, where the members of God's select few constructed theological connections between the incidents of their everyday lives and the will of God brought to bear on a fallen Earth. But “everyday life” for the New England Puritans took place in a world saturated with holy significance. In their diaries, various events were often recounted multiple times in attempts to place the occurrences within a sacred framework -- to understand how every stillbirth, every massacre, every act of witchcraft fit the overall narrative: one’s continuous movement towards the wonderul, terrible presence of God’s grace. Does that sound delusional? As if they were "out of touch with reality"? But look carefully across the gulf of almost five hundred years: the only difference is that the particular New England Puritan way of seeing the world has faded away into a dead mythology. The New England Puritan corpus has thus passed into the hands of archivists like me, and we carefully inspect, clean, organize, and catalog each fragment, so that historians and other researchers can better analyze and criticize the remains. But again, the only difference between us and the Puritans are those hundreds of years, giving us the perspective to clearly map (where they could not, as still inside them) the contours of their lives and beliefs. A diarist today still considers her writings fiercely private; she still writes to try and understand the events of her existence, to reflect on her thoughts and reactions, to infuse her life with more meaning, her own personal mythology, even as the actual substance of that meaning is always shifting. There has been one huge change: thoughts that we would normally keep private in our diary entries can, and usually are, broadcast online to everyone who subscribes to our social media feeds . Now that we live in the Network Age, it’s possible to keep a diary and have a mythology that’s personal but not private, embodied in posts, tweets, and status updates. Maybe private and public diaries alike are both what sociolinguistics call a “speech act,” specifically an “illocutionary act,” where the speaker uses language not just to communicate information but to enact a change in the current state of reality (“I hereby sentence you…” “I accept the nomination…” “I resign the Presidency…”). In that case, the point of any given diary entry, even one made public, isn’t really the actual content of the entry, it’s the act of creation, the building and modifying of the now-shareable personal mythology, and now we can even incorporate others’ responses (if any) into our own narrative, a convergence of private myths in a shared astral-electronic plane.

2005:

A Researcher working in our John Clellon Holmes collection made an exciting discovery: a diary of a previously unknown trip Holmes made to Mexico as a teenager. Holmes was one of the founding Beats; he coined the phrase “Beat Generation,” was close with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg; and his novel Go is one of the first Beat writings. As part of his collection, he had decades’ worth of letters, diary entries, and other documents, carefully arranged by date; so Holmes seemed to take documenting his own life and work seriously. The Mexico diary -- which according to the researcher consisted mostly of “sexual braggadocio” -- might have been significant to the development of Beat literature, as it would have predated Kerouac writing about a similar trip in part four of On the Road. But a couple days later, the Researcher asked me to come over to her table. She was exhaustively familiar with the details of Holmes’ life by this point, as she was trying to write his biography. The Mexico trip, she said, never happened. It couldn’t have happened. Holmes was, without a doubt, not in Mexico when all the events documented in the diary would have occurred. It was fiction written in the style of a personal diary. But this “diary” was never developed into a story or novel; most likely, no one except Holmes had ever read it. Was he the only intended audience? If not, who was it written for, and why?

2015:

At the repository where I work, most of the collections are based around individuals (as opposed to organizations, publications, or other corporate entities, though we have those too); and a good deal of those collections’ content consists of what archivists call “personal papers.” Unlike the records of an institution, personal papers always include non-“professional” items, quotidian objects that everyone accumulates in the course of mere living: diaries, journals, photo albums, letters, postcards, souvenirs, children’s drawings, maybe a pocketwatch, some clothing, family Bibles, mementos and ephemera. One of our collections includes two bullets taken from the dead body of a soldier killed in World War I, faithfully kept by his grieving mother. Archival institutions in general are built around institutions and want nothing at all to do with personal papers. Archives that are manuscript repositories, however -- institutions like mine -- often collect and preserve personal papers alongside all our other varied holdings. The only issue we have is the basic one: categorization. Archives often use standardized categories to describe their material the way, say, libraries do. But applying a set of standard bibliographic categories to a bound volume is one thing. That sort of cataloging has a long history, with many traditions and best practices. Cataloging personal papers is not so simple. Any given letter might touch on numerous different subjects; so what is it “about”? A diary might include observations about the weather, important appointments, pressed flowers, quotes from other writers, or all or none of those. Cataloging always conceals as much as it reveals, especially with personal papers. It’s no wonder the entries for personal papers in many archival finding aids looks like this: “Box X. Series Y: Personal Papers, [Begin Date] - [End Date].” This presents a problem for the many students and historians who, since the 1950s, have been trying to do (in the words of E.P. Thompson) “history from below.” These kinds of “non-records” are exactly what they are looking for, but because they’re difficult to describe, they’re difficult to find. One recent attempt at a solution has been for archives to digitize as much of this kind of hidden material as possible so it’s easier to access remotely. But that doesn’t solve the description problem... in fact, it often makes it worse. “Digitizing personal papers” usually means disaggregating material that has been grouped together physically (for whatever reason) into numerous discrete digital objects that each need a base level of decent-quality descriptive metadata in order to be discoverable by online search and browse functions. The main barrier between users and personal papers isn’t limited access, it’s the limits of our descriptive and cataloging language.

August 2000:

The material from The Writer arrived, as usual, in a plain cardboard box. It was my job to open all the incoming boxes, rummage through the contents, create a short accession record, and then figure out how I and my student assistants were going to rehouse and describe the new material. I had started this job less than two weeks ago, but I recognized most of the contents as “personal papers”: letters to friends, family photographs, tax returns, old magazines, maps, postcards. The Writer’s box had all these things. Then the objects turned strange: an empty prescription bottle from a pet clinic, for dog tranquilizers; a tiny envelope full of some sort of dried, crumbled foliage I couldn’t identify; a single stone of rose quartz; a pocket New Testament, its margins brimming with pencilled marginalia; a button-down shirt, maybe intended as packing material; a copy of the I Ching dated 1959. At the bottom of the box were various notebooks and journals; they were good quality, with firm bindings and heavy paper stock. I opened one and started to flip through it, looking for a date, title, signature, anything identifying. The Writer had filled almost every millimeter of space on every ruled page with black-inked, blocky-lettered words. I turned more pages. The only holes in these walls of black text appeared where The Writer had cut and pasted pictures on the leaves of the journal -- yogis, gymnasts, adults with their heads replaced with the faces of crying babies, images of Orthodox Christian icons, mothers and children. Most of these were taken from newspapers and magazines; some were photograph prints that had been trimmed, cut, written on. Without realizing it I began to read the text. The Writer struggled against various people out to exhaust her physically and drain her spirit; I realized after a few pages that these were her second husband and her stepchildren. Her tone switched from rage to rapture when she expounded at length on how the physical body could achieve real immortality. All we truly need to survive, she wrote, is exposure to enough sunlight and a supply of truly clean air; if only she could make others understand. The thoughts became impossible to follow, the phrases scrambled, the language like an alien English. The words kept going and going, and I began to feel the space around my desk shrinking. I felt physically encased inside The Writer’s brain, sealed inside a lightless, windowless box. But I kept reading. I lost track of time until something interrupted me, and I snapped the book shut, at the same time recognizing that I had started to crouch in my chair and cross my legs like I was curling up into a ball. I put the journal back in its box, and wondered if she was crazy, and if I had briefly brushed against that madness; but then I considered all the thoughts buzzing in my own brain on a daily basis -- if anyone stepped inside my head for just a moment they might think I was insane, too.

2015:

So the inadequacy of cataloging makes curating personal papers especially challenging. What makes the task even more interesting is that personal papers are heavily curated by whatever person created or accumulated the papers in the first place (and often by family members too). Whatever that individual decided to discard is permanently deleted from the historical record, and whatever they saved is now considered to have “lasting value” if the archivist also decides to save it. It’s similar to the process of self-curation that goes on inside every person every day: what to show, what to hide, what to say, when to keep silent. Your personal papers are the result of hundreds of small decisions concerning what to include and what to omit from the evidence of your existence. It’s the archivist’s job to try and maintain the outcome of those decisions... but along the way, odd things can happen. A persona of the collectee usually emerges, created from whatever is available -- various biographical sources, oral histories, a public image, and of course the contents of their personal papers. But a persona is a fragile thing even when it’s being actively maintained by someone. Personal papers have the paradoxical effect of simultaneously working to support and subvert a collectee’s curated persona. To frustrated historians and researchers using a collectee’s personal papers, the intentional absences and omissions can start to look suspicious, manipulative, even cowardly, despite any concrete evidence to the contrary. The collectee, through their careful grooming of their papers, has achieved almost the opposite of what they intended through their fastidious work; and I’ve seen researchers decide that they had to pore carefully over every document to find something “interesting,” i.e. a hint of life behind the dead-faced mask presented by the papers. Again, as with diaries, social media platforms have changed this process, but not very much. Individuals still curate their personas as much as ever, though digital personas, it turns out, are harder to groom as records tend to persist almost forever online (if you know where to look). The problem for archivists: social media companies have zero interest in repositories that wish to capture and preserve these digital personae. Some companies have data that is just not structured in such a way to fit with current archiving practices. When the Library of Congress approached Twitter in 2010 about archiving its data output to that point (beginning from its start in 2006), they ended up with 170 billion messages with no good way to search them. Twitter wants you to be constantly refreshing your feed, not going back and reading old messages from years ago. An extreme version is Snapchat, where the images, once sent, are supposed to self-destruct after a short time elapses. And then there’s Facebook, which is actively hostile to anyone to tries to capture information on its pages. It’s all their data, after all, and they don’t want anyone else scraping it together, aggregating it, and/or selling it -- that messes with their entire business model. Some archives, like the Smithsonian, have worked with Facebook to archive the sites of their own institutions and employees. But it’s safe to assume that these social media systems will make their information more proprietary, not less, as time goes on. It will be hard to explain to a researcher someday why a diary from 500 years ago is readily available, but a publicly-available web site from 2010 will be unavailable for another hundred years. It’s yet another paradox: the more our private myths are made public on line, the harder it is to preserve those narratives and stories for the future, to create the next generation of personal papers, and the next after that.

September 1938:

Maya Deren begins her final letter to “A.E.” by saying that it will be short, as she has already written a long letter to her father (a prominent psychiatrist) and a man named Don. Much of the letter describes her attempts to form friendships with the other women at Smith, despite her sense that they disapprove of her; “there is wall between us,” she writes, “which I cannot break down.” She closes her letter with these words:

“And here is an idea for a poem to be called ‘Study in Geometry’. That if you are seven feet away from a person that person is always seven feet away from you. Nearness must be mutual. It is true that you can face the person and concern yourself with him but nearness itself is the distance between you. Each person is a center and his relationship to other[s] the orbit of a circle and the person and the end of his radius has a circle of his own.

Now to write Don,

Good night,”