Archivists

Dear Brandeis community,

 

I have been thinking this week about archives, about the records we create and keep, and about the stories those records tell. I began my week in one of my new roles this year, as yearbook co-advisor with our librarian Beckie Beeson. In our first meeting with a big and impressively smart yearbook staff we talked about what drew the students and the grownups to the work of making a yearbook—digital photography, an opportunity to tell the story of the year, an interest in journalism, a love of writing, etc.—and looked through old and older Brandeis annuals to consider what we wanted to keep and what to change. The passage of time marked by the books was of great interest to the staffers: the change from black and white to color, finding older siblings in their kindergarten year, and tracking down Brandeis alumni staff and faculty like Rachel Freeman and Isaac Jacobs-Gomes in their middle school awkwardness. Sitting in the beautifully redesigned space of our library, I found myself wondering about what stories the archive of Brandeis tells, too: how the accretion of experiences in the walls of our school is held and communicated.

 

I was surprised how saddened I was earlier this week to hear of the National Museum in Brazil losing nearly its entire collection to a devastating fire. I have never been to the museum, or even to Brazil—but the loss of so much cultural history seems a global tragedy, regardless of the particular connection. In the age of instant cloud backups for so much of what we document, losing artifacts with no capacity to restore them is especially surprising, and upsetting. On Twitter the go-to descriptor of the event seemed to be as a modern-day Library of Alexandria, highlighting how fragile so much of what we keep remains, across the millennia.

 

Of course, the digital record, for all its infinite backups and relative imperviousness to fire, is sometimes better at holding history than telling stories. We were at a family barbecue on Labor Day, and at one point sat flipping through some photo books made to document particular adventures—a cross-country drive, a trip to Hawaii—and found ourselves bemoaning the intangibility of our photo collections. While we document and share more about our lives than at any other point in history, so little of that documentation remains beyond the instant of its sharing. Like many other parents, I’m sure, we at the Glass household have big intentions to comb our photo archives and create lovely, physical books for grandparents and ourselves to tell stories of our moments, to set out and treasure—but perhaps against the unending accretion of new pictures, or perhaps in the midst of the rapid current of raising young children, it never seems to happen. And so, we blink, and while the pictures still exist out there in the ether, they are, for all intents and purposes, gone.

 

Legend has it that the Library of Alexandria had an inscription on its walls: The place of the cure of the soul. I had always taken that at face value—the restorative power of books, the powerful positive impact of writing and memory on our souls. But this week, I find myself hearing the other meaning of cure: to preserve. I am grateful that Jewish practice has such an emphasis on story-telling and collective memory, on the preservation of a shared soul. And I am grateful too to be doing the work of institutional soul curing with our yearbook staffers, sorting the archives of our moments for the new stories we are writing together.

 

Wishing you all weekends full of soulful archives, my friends.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan