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These days I am rereading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s epic about the political mind of Abraham Lincoln, “Team of Rivals.” Scores of bona fide scholars and critics have raved about this tome over the last eighteen years. Indeed, Steven Spielberg based his film “Lincoln” on this book. I assure you, this human-focused piece of literature is everything it is cracked up to be.
But right now, when I think about this book, I am pondering form over content. Because I’m astonished over the arduous “paper chasing” Ms. Goodwin brought forth to write it, the vast amount of information she gathered by traveling to libraries and archives, sifting through tens of thousands of physical letters, court records, and legal documents. Indeed, the source notes at the end of this thick book span some one hundred twenty pages at a font size of about 6.
I worry about the future of such endeavors
Because…
Well, a bit of history.
Once upon a time during the second and/or third centuries, BC, there existed The Great Library of Ancient Alexandria which was part of a learned institution dedicated to The Muses called the Mouseion, from whence we derive the word, museum. (Or if you’re a Flannery O’Connor fan, muvzeevum.) The Great Library’s stacks were filled with papyrus scrolls of just about all of the knowledge of the Hellenic and ancient worlds, organized in a standardized fashion and well cared for thanks to the librarians ruled by Ptolemy II Philadelphus and the Ptolemaic kings that followed. (Library historians concur that scrolls could last longer than books because there was no spine to break by laying a book face down, and it was impossible to dog-ear the pages.)
The library began a centuries-long decline starting in 145 BC when Ptolemy VIII Physcon kicked out all the intellectuals because he was a small-minded thinker, an impatient reader, and was particularly bad at Scrabble. Those scattering scholars took scrolls with them, but while most librarians are scholars, not all scholars are librarians. Indeed, many of those learned citizens were disorganized and kept cluttered rooms of study. For example, many of the writings of the epic poet Apollonius of Rhodes (author of one of my favorite childhood animation/live-action movies, Jason and the Argonauts) are lost to the ages. His most recurrent declaration heard from outside his window was, “Δηλώνω, το έχω κάπου εδώ γύρω.” (“Dang, I had it laying around here somewhere.”)
Then the library suffered a final blow when Julius Caesar “accidentally” set it aflame in 48 BC. (What’s a war without a bit of pillage?)
A massive wealth of the scientific knowledge and literary life of early Western civilization became irrecoverable.
• • •
Somewhere in Europe during World War II, my Uncle Carter found a very fine German movie camera in an abandoned automobile.
Good Uncle Carter made a gift of this camera to my Uncle Bill. Uncle Bill possessed all of the cinematography skills of a small-town Georgia dentist. The individual shots are three to five seconds long. One shot, in particular, is of my Great-Grandmother Pickett [b. Newton County, 1861] holding her great-grandchild, my cousin Lauree. Great-Grandmother Pickett, rarely photographed, is on the screen for only two-and-a-half rocks of her rocking chair. Now to be fair to my uncle, the film for this camera – expensive to buy and expensive to process – only had a three-minute capacity. That explains the economy of old home movies.
In the 1980s, Uncle Bill had those films transferred to that new-fangled Video Home System (VHS) format. He generously gave everyone in the family a copy. After I watched it, I asked him what had happened to the original film. He told me, “It’s been thrown out. We don’t need it anymore. We have it on videotape.”
Well, shucks. I was interested in making still photographs from the film. I had acquaintances who knew how to do such work.
The hazy picture that accompanies this piece is a bit of a testament to my uncle’s stealthy use of that old movie camera. I love this picture. My Grandaddy is saying something funny and my Grandmama is laughing unabashedly in the way I used to try and make her laugh. Being of an age and of a certain “social station,” Mrs. W.S. Cook, Sr. (née Sallie Mae Pickett, b. 1894) would have never knowingly allowed herself to be photographed in such a gleeful countenance. Every time she discovered a camera before her, she immediately shifted into a “dignified” demeanor of her expressionless face with a closed mouth, flat as the straight metal edge of a ruler.
This “photo” was created by pausing the digital video at this precise frame and taking a screenshot. I did as much contrast editing as I could, but there are a lot of generations here: the original film gone forever, to VHS now stretched and unusable, to DVD which have learned does have a shelf life, to a digital posting on Facebook where it was distributed to the relatives.
And what’s my point?
I’m not a doom & gloom sort, but I do wonder over our dependence on the frightfully gargantuan yet frangible gossamer web of the internet and digital storage.
On account of…
My personal Facebook page has utterly and completely been hacked and has disappeared. Kuput. Gonesville. Ain’t-no-more. Twenty-whatever years of writings, postings, smart-aleck quips, photos, and distant human connections are vanished, a random scattering of binary ones and zeros – my own teensy-weensy Library at Alexandria.
So…
Back up all your stuff, y’all. And if you’re writing a book, print it up on real paper.
And try not to leave those papers at a Motel 4 in McCook, Nebraska.
Andy Irwin, of Covington, is a natural storyteller, humorist, singer, songwriter and musician. He can be reached at andy@andyirwin.com.