Tidying up

In the end I couldn't ignore the surfaces all higgledy-piggledy with pieces of paper I have kept for years and I decided to start tidying up. This was about five weeks ago. I still haven't adequately pruned my four or five boxes stuffed with language teaching materials; I should probably throw all that paper away because whenever I still get the opportunity to teach something, this morning for instance, when Nadia, Ülle, Tanya and Frances came to learn some German from me, I prefer to work from something I haven't used before (this time I gave them a description of Mainau am Bodensee).

I thought I had lost the book of quotations I compiled in the 1970s, but to my delight I have found it again and have also unearthed a letter written in cursive script and sent from Upper Lodge, Linden Hill, Twyford, Berks, by my very young aunt on October 8th, 1915, that describes my father as a baby learning his first words. Sic:

Dear Winnie,
I am sending you a little snap=shot of my dear little Brother Bobby which was taken in the gardon. I hope you will Like it. Mother hopes you are all quite well. as we all are. Mum will write to your mother soon. We all hope your Brother Frank is allright. I am in the second standard now. Bobby is 8 months this Sunday. He can say Dad mum and tar. and has got 2 teeth. He is a good boy and do not cry much. I do hope you will be able to come and see him next year. now I must say good=night with love to all from Lulu Tullett.

By "tar" I think she meant "Ta!"

Probably the most precious part of my archives is my vast hoard of cards, photographs and letters. What's fascinating, or disturbing, is the thought that all of these missives were sent without foresight, and people's long-ago smiles in the photos sometimes attest to an over-optimistic view of what was to follow—or is that just my morbid imagination? Anyhow, retrieved after the interim, they can be seen with hindsight now and a good deal more can be read between the lines. As I sort through my collection of Christmas letters it strikes me how I've come to know people's life stories in these small increments. That's not an original thought. A character in Paul Guimard's Rue du Havre, is a quasi invisible old man who sells lottery tickets day by day to commuters coming and going near the Gare St Lazare in Paris:

Devant Julien, comme devant une borne, défilait une humanité ... que jour après jour il avait appris à déchiffrer, à connaître et, faute de mieux, à aimer. En dix années de station immobile, il avait levé les masques de beaucoup de ces robots qui ... le frôlaient sans le voir ...Julien pouvait alors saisir un mot, une attitude, un geste par lesquels un coin d'âme se découvrait. En mettant bout à bout ces matériaux volés, l'observateur clandestin était parvenu à une connaissance aiguë de ses personnages ... Il ne les avait jamais côtoyés plus d'une minute. Mes ces brefs contacts mulitpliés par dix années avaient acquis une surprenante densité ... lui livrant chacun une parcelle de sa vérité intime qui rejoindrait, sur d'imaginaires fiches, la masse des petits détails capturés au vol.

I love this book. On another page of Rue du Havre the narrator, comparing him to a paleontologist, comments on how little this lonely old man needs to overhear in order to be able to understand a passer-by:

C'étaient le plus souvent d'incomplètes et médiocres confidences mais au-delà desquelles Julien savait déchiffrer de plus secrètes pensées, exercé qu'il était, et depuis si longtemps, à reconsituer le plésiosaure avec un fragment de molaire.

Fénéon was good at inference from minimal evidence too and expected his readers to apply the trick to Les Nouvelles en trois lignes, as did Aubrey, when he wrote Brief Lives.

I shall carry on keeping most of the letters because like diplomats, gypsies or military families, we have said goodbye to far too many people. My clutter is a reaction to my sense of loss.