Foreword to the Archives

Imagine you are poking around in someone's attic, where you discover an old linen trunk, and when you open it, you find it is crammed full of notebooks and loose documents — and some of them look very old. You read a few of those on top, or read at them, just to see what they are about, and begin to wonder how they might be connected: sometimes you perceive a link here and there — a name appears in more than one writing, maybe, or now and then some dates seem to line up — but most of the individual texts are just that: singletons that don't relate to each other at all, or not that you can see, so far...

But, you reflect, they all ended up here, together like this; how did that happen? because of course every writing has another story in addition to the one it tells: how did it get from the author to you? Tracing that second story back to its source, you realize that of course there's a third story to be discovered, or discerned: how did this document come to be composed in the first place? how does it fit in with the story of the author's life? And so on: as the Remnant say, no end of stories and their stories.

One of the many pleasures of exploring an archive takes place at the very beginning, before you have any comprehension of its overall structure or extent. In that moment, every new thing you discover is itself alone, you know nothing about it to begin with except what it says about itself, you don't know where to go when you finish reading it, but it feels like every step you take, in whatever direction, is progress.

After a while, an impression of context begins to emerge: you now perceive a writing as being in among other writings, whose only connection at first was that you were reading them, but you start to feel them talking to each other, if only in your recollection of them, so you go back and reread this one, then that one — and you start to perceive structure as well as content, how they resemble each other, or differ in this or that respect. At this point the pure experience which Egderus describes as reading 'something bright and right and beautiful for the first time' gives over, more and more, to the forensic activities of the investigator, which of course have their own pleasures, but they are quite distinct.

One gets to know a person in just this way, is it not so? And so, you are invited into the company of just these persons, whose writings address you, whom they imagined, and longed for enough to tell just these stories, in just this way, and for whom they have waited until now, when you appeared, just as they hoped you would.

Again and again, welcome.