Tag Archives: Preservation

The Long Way a Voice Comes Home

Posted on by
2

“The meaning of the past is never finished.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975). From her Between Past and Future (1961), where she argues that history is not closed or complete, but morally alive, awaiting renewed attention, responsibility, and understanding.

Last week, I found my way to a small library tucked behind a hardware store in Deltaville, Virginia. It was the sort of place you might drive past without ever knowing it was there—a quiet, cream-colored building softened by climbing vines and brightened by a mural where hummingbirds hovered and monarchs drifted above a riot of painted flowers. A sailboat logo and a modest white sign announced Middlesex County Public Library — Deltaville Branch, a name that made the place feel both official and intimate at once. Nothing about it was grand, but everything about it felt intentional. Step through the doors, and you are immediately reminded why libraries endure: they do not shout their importance; they simply keep offering it.

I had been invited to speak about Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina, a project that has occupied a surprising amount of my life. But as I stood there, in a room filled with people who had given their afternoon to books, it became clear that what I was really there to talk about was not a colonial essayist at all. It was about the invisible network of librarians, teachers, archivists, and patient institutions that had made that work possible.

Nothing I have written would exist without them. Not the book. Not the essays. Not even the questions that led me to them.

For most of us, research looks solitary. A scholar in a reading room. A book on a desk. A voice speaking from a distant century. But none of that happens without a vast, quiet scaffolding behind it, made up of people who catalog, preserve, teach, fund, and protect the materials that others one day come to use.

Libraries quietly hold information—sometimes for centuries—without knowing who will need it, or when, or why. They preserve voices long after those voices have gone silent, trusting that someday someone will come along prepared to listen carefully.

That afternoon in Deltaville, surrounded by that small but devoted group of Library Friends, I realized I was standing inside the visible tip of something much larger. A chain of care that stretches across generations, linking a colonial newspaper, a Charleston library, a community college system, and a branch library in the heart of the Chesapeake Bay.

My own place in that chain began long before I knew it. When I was a graduate student in the early 1970s, I stumbled across a series of anonymous essays published in the 1750s in The South-Carolina Gazette. A leading scholar, Leo LeMay, had remarked that they were among the finest essays in all of early American literature and had urged that someone edit them, publish them, and identify their author. The challenge sat there for decades, unanswered.

What allowed me to return to it was not individual brilliance, but institutional grace. I spent twenty-five years at the Library of Congress, learning how archives think and how preservation outlasts any single lifetime. Later, the Virginia Community College System gave me something just as precious when I turned fifty: the chance to become an English professor, a dream I had carried since childhood. And then, when I was named Chancellor’s Professor, it gave me a two-year appointment that provided something more precious than funding. It provided time. Time to think. Time to return to unfinished questions. Time to do the kind of slow, careful work that real discovery requires.

That is why educators and educational institutions matter so deeply in this story. They do not just transmit knowledge; at their best, they grant permission. Permission to linger with a problem. Permission to follow a hunch. Permission to trust that careful thinking is worth the investment.

Being in Deltaville also gave me something I had not realized I was missing: the chance to thank Glenn DuBois in person. Glenn was Chancellor during two important turning points of my professional life. He was Chancellor when the Virginia Community College System first welcomed me into the classroom at age fifty, and he was Chancellor again years later when I was named Chancellor’s Professor, the appointment that made this work possible.

We rarely get to look someone in the eye and say, simply and honestly, “You changed my life.” But that afternoon, in a small library behind a hardware store, I did. It was one of those moments when gratitude stops being abstract and becomes something you can actually feel in the room.

The essays I eventually brought back into the light turned out to belong to Alexander Gordon, a Scottish-born scholar and singer who lived in colonial Charleston. But authorship matters because it allows us to place a voice in a life, a mind in a world, and a text in a tradition.

There is a Jewish folk belief that a person dies twice: once when the body stops, and again when their name is spoken for the last time. If that is so, then archives are a kind of moral infrastructure, designed to keep names from slipping into that second death. Every catalog entry, every preserved page, every carefully tended collection is an act of faith in the future.

So is education. When the Virginia Community College System opened its doors to me in midlife, it did not just give me a job. It gave me a second beginning. Without that second chance, the first version of my curiosity would have remained unfinished.

All of this came together for me in that small Deltaville library. A place without marble columns or grand staircases, but full of the same quiet dignity that animates every serious library anywhere. People had gathered not to be dazzled, but to listen. To care. To take part in the long human habit of keeping stories alive.

Today, Gordon’s voice is no longer anonymous. His essays are no longer orphans. A lost body of work has been restored to its author, and a chapter of early American literary history has been set right. That restoration belongs not just to a scholar or a book, but to the institutions that made it possible—to libraries that guard knowledge, to educators who foster discovery, and to communities that believe the past is worth preserving.

All proceeds from my book go to the Virginia Foundation for Community College Education, which feels exactly right. Libraries and community colleges share the same moral instinct: they exist to hold doors open, not to keep people out.

I left Deltaville with a deeper gratitude for the fact that nothing we do alone ever really is. Behind every footnote stands a librarian. Behind every discovery stands a teacher. Behind every second act stands an institution willing to say yes.

And behind every recovered voice stands a chain of quiet, faithful human hands, passing something forward because they believe someone, someday, will need it.

Show Me What You Wrote

Posted on by
Reply

“The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.”

— David Hare (b. 1947.) British playwright and screenwriter, whose works probe truth, belief, and the human condition.

Sometimes in the hush of evening, when the lamp spills its amber light and the world grows gentle, I watch. His head tilts slightly, caught by the glow, and suddenly, the years loosen their grip. The lines that life has written across his face soften; the jaw loosens, light as breath; the mouth, so often set in quiet thought, curves with the ease of youth. His eyes, clear and steady, seem to brighten from within, carrying a spark that belonged first to a boy and then to a young man. Slowly, the present thins. I see him slipping into his past. Fifty. Thirty. Twenty. And then, for the briefest moment, the man beside me becomes the eighteen-year-old he once was—time erasing each layer, revealing what was always there: the young man, quietly returning.

As I glance elsewhere in the room, I see an artifact from his past—one that has crossed time and threshold to find its place in ours: the grand piano. Massive and unyielding, it took four men to wrestle it off the truck and ease it through the doorway. Yet here it rests, polished wood catching the lamplight, waiting.

At this moment, I still hear the sound as his hands moved across the piano earlier in the day—measured, assured, easy. And I heard “For All We Know” rise into the room, each note carrying a hush that reached backward in time. The melody was not just music; it was memory, and it wrapped itself around him, around me, around the room itself. Ruby retreated to the bed, but not fully at rest. She leaned forward, her body stretched long, her head angled as far as she dared—as though even she knew the swell of sound carried us into places layered and deep. She held herself at the edge, cautious not to tumble into the wandering past, into the chasms of memory, beckoning us toward knowing and truth.

Elsewhere in the room, near the piano, another layer from the past peels back. Hanging on the wall is a sepia-toned etching—Salena Gazebo, number 8 of only 200, signed by the artist Carl Johnson. The lines are delicate, deliberate: the curving path, the quiet trees, the pavilion standing open like an invitation. It feels less like a structure than a memory, as if the paper itself breathed it into being. When I look at it, I sense not just the gazebo, but the moments once lived beneath it—the warmth of gatherings, the hush of twilight, the whispered vows of past lovers who lingered there. Dream and truth blur, as though the etching had captured not a place at all but a pulse of longing and a flicker of knowledge, carrying us softly toward knowing and truth.

In another room, on top of the chest of drawers, rest family photographs. Portraits, a chorus of faces gathered through years, smiling, standing, caught in stillness. They look out across the room with a quiet weight, less about who they are than the collective feel they give: belonging, continuity, the insistence that life moves forward even as it circles back. They do not need names to speak; their presence alone is enough.

Nearby, on a table, sits something smaller, more ordinary yet no less enduring: an iron toast holder. His grandmother’s. On his mother’s side? Or, maybe, his father’s? The lineage matters less than the fact that he kept it, carried it through moves and years, never discarding, never forgetting. The metal holds more than memories of bread he may never have seen toasted. It holds a thread of persistence, a reason to keep even the smallest objects close.

In the dining room, on a side table, another artifact gleams in silver relief: The Last Supper, framed, gifted to his maternal grandparents on their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Sacred and commemorative at once, it shimmers with devotion, not only to faith but also to family. The silver has traveled down through generations, carried into his keeping, held as though letting go would diminish more than memory. It is a marker of continuity, of reverence, of love that lasted long enough to be honored.

And then there is the little boy riding a dog—a keepsake that belonged first to his father when his father was a child, before his life was cut tragically short. A small porcelain figure, a child astride a loyal companion, frozen in time. Yet in that figure is more than innocence; it is a bridge across absence, a way of knowing a father he never met. It survived when the man did not, passed on to him as both wound and inheritance, loss and gift. That little boy on the dog rides still through the years, carrying ache and legacy.

Through these artifacts, I glimpse the man I already know and love, his story unfolding in fragments that matter. In the little boy riding the dog, I see both wound and inheritance, a bridge across absence. In the Last Supper, I see reverence, devotion, love honored and passed along. In the iron toast holder, I see endurance, the instinct to keep and carry even what is small. In the family photographs, I see continuity, lives pressed together across generations. In the drawing of the gazebo, I see invitation and hush—the twilight blur where dreams fade into memory and truth. And in the grand piano, I hear the melody that threads them all together—still rising, still echoing, ever playing in the quiet of his soul.

These artifacts matter to him and, now, to me. I could point to others. But I won’t. Yet one more remains, quiet and insistent, the truest of them all—not carved in silver or pressed into porcelain, but carried in ink and idea. His 1965 high-school graduation essay. He was co-valedictorian. He was eighteen.

It rests inside his high-school yearbook, the Bluejay, its cover deep blue and gilt, its pages a mosaic of faces, cheers, and world events already turning into history. And there, slipped carefully between those pages, lies his speech—typed, carried through six decades of moves and seasons. The paper holds its shape, and the words stand sure, preserved as though waiting for their moment to be read again. In its keeping, I see more than memory; I see devotion—the instinct to preserve not only what he did but who he was becoming. It is an artifact, yes, but it is also a testament, held safe in the place that marked his youth and carried forward into the man he is now.

I smiled and whispered:

“Show me what you wrote.”

He lifted the page, holding it in his hands, just as he held it onstage sixty years ago. Soft at first, his voice grew firmer as he returned to the beliefs that had steadied him even then: that learning gives life its shape, that responsibility gives it weight, that hope gives it breath, and that perseverance gives it endurance. Sixty years have passed, yet as he read, I heard not only the boy addressing his classmates but the man beside me—the same convictions intact, the same spirit enduring.

In those moments, as his voice stretched back and returned to me across the decades, I realized that of all his artifacts, this was the richest. My partner, Gary T. Knutson, wrote those words in youth. They carried him into a future he could not yet imagine. And they anchor him still—steadying him in the present, guiding him toward tomorrow. The piano may sing, the photographs may remember, the silver may gleam, the porcelain boy may still ride—but they can only point, only hint. His own words, fragile on paper yet alive in spirit, opened the door wider. They revealed not just what he kept but who he was becoming, and who he still is.

That is the power of words—not just Gary’s words, but all our words. They outlast objects, outshine heirlooms, outlive even memory. In them can be found who we are when all else has been stripped away—values, beliefs, longings, the essence of self, laid bare. And more than that, words do not simply keep; they move. They persuade and console, ignite and endure. They reveal who we were, and they shape who we might yet become. That is their gift, and their power—becoming, in a way, stronger than stone.

Show me what you wrote, and I’ll see who you are—then, now, and still becoming. For words outlast memory and outshine the heirlooms we keep. They carry the essence. They carry the longing. And they proclaim the truths we’ve always held.