My friend Chuck wrote today about keeping a record of the things we make. “I’m rereading Jon Lee Anderson’s seminal biography of Che Guevara right now,” Chuck writes. “I have been struck by how many details of Guevara’s life and the shaping of his ideology we only know because he wrote them down in his diaries from a very young age.” Chuck goes on to make a larger point about the things we make being worth saving, that people may enjoy looking at them years down the line: “May we all love our own work enough to preserve it like this.”
If preservation is the metric I don’t think I love my work at all.
From 2010 through 2012 I wrote for a music blog. I’d draft articles in Google Docs and send them to my editor and they’d go online. A few years later I unthinkingly deleted the email address attached to that Google Docs account. By that time, the blog had changed its name and migrated websites; everything I’d written for them was gone from the Internet. I didn’t learn that had happened until a few years after it did, when I set out to look for an essay to show someone and found that it was nowhere.
At that moment I saw two doors in front of me: one leading to regret and another leading to release. I opened the second; I wanted to see if the loss could be a gift. I had a feeling that what I had written would matter just as much even if I could never see it again.
A few years after all that I tweeted about this, and someone who saw the tweet used the WayBack Machine to find some articles I’d written. It was nice to see them, but the best part was feeling the kindness of someone going out of their way to find them for me. I downloaded a few of them out of some sense of obligation toward the posterity that Chuck writes about, like maybe one day in the future I’d want to see them again. But mostly I felt like they didn’t belong to me anymore. Their loss had reconfigured my sense of attachment not only to those specific articles, but also to all of the things that I make and have made. I keep, for example, a document called “running list of published pieces,” wherein I purportedly save links to everything I’ve written, but I checked just now—the last entry is three months old. I also purportedly download everything I write online as a PDF and save it into a folder on my computer, but I can’t remember the last time I did that. The music I have downloaded is spread out across multiple libraries, on hard drives and USB sticks and folders within folders. Still more music is on streaming subscription services that might take it down any time. I make playlists on YouTube I’ll never look at again; the links in them will break; someone will delete the video or it will get taken down because of a copyright violation. My photo libraries are similarly diasporic. I can’t really be bothered with feeling like I am losing something by letting them be this way. No matter what, I will still have taken that picture or loved that song or made that playlist.
It’s not that I’m disorganized. For more than ten years I’ve kept a document where I type every poem I read that I like, and I have no problem keeping up with that. I set aside hours on weekends to type poems I have saved on Instagram or Twitter or in my phone’s camera reel. I have a folder on my computer where I save PDFs of articles and essays I read and enjoy. I don’t give away books, nor do I get rid of the tabs I put in them to mark passages that I like. I care about being able to refer to these things again enough to save them.
What I don’t care about enough to preserve a record of is myself, and it’s not because I think I’ll never die. Rather, it’s because I know I will die that I see keeping a record as an exercise in futility, like emptying the ocean of time’s passing with an eyedropper. I have a pile of postcards and letters that people have sent me, but I have never bothered to find a box to put them in, and I never look at them, and I think for every one of these that I’ve kept I’ve also lost one in a move or under a fridge. It’s not that I don’t care about my friends or what they send or say to me; it’s just that I care about them as they are now, not as they were when they sent a letter. I don’t care about myself as I will be in five or ten or fifty years. I care about me now, as unknowably close to or far from the death that no journaling or letter-saving or PDF-downloading will keep from me.