Historical content can be an incredibly informative resource, telling us how people lived and thought. But we must remember that it’s a small fraction of contemporaneous material that survives, even as we hope, of course, that it’s our own existence that is ultimately memorialized. Sometimes it is through the gaps that we read history or are forced... See more

We increasingly try to fit all our experience into a digital spreadsheet, and written words can be logged, searched, counted, isolated, and edited or deleted far more easily than anything else. They allow us to construct a simplified parallel reality alongside the unbearably ineffable one.