A memory palace of paper
Afew years ago, the tall, narrow shelves in my office fell, tossing books and shells and fragile figurines across the room. In the archaeological dig that followed, unremembered fractions of my past came careening back. Letters that had been tucked inside slender poetry collections made me miss, again, lost friends. A series of photographs once stuffed between books reignited that moment in time when I stood in proximity to the literati and wondered what real authors do to earn a place among them. (I wonder still.) A broadside signed by Rosanne Cash, the remnant of an evening I spent sitting in a small room on a Philadelphia campus listening to her talk and sing and ponder the place of memory and memoir.
But it was the long-dormant plastic tub that had been dinged by the landslide that contained the greatest beauty and heartache. Its lid had been cracked, so I removed it. Its insides were shuffled — a sprawl of folders, files, cards. I cleared space on the floor and sat by that tub’s side and, removing one torn or worn or faded slip of paper at a time, watched my life unfold.
This is what paper is, what it does. It’s the picture you imagined as a child, realized in crayon hues. It’s the story where you left it, inside the pages of a book. It’s the report card that tried to define you, the receipts that tallied your cravings, the diploma you might not think you deserved. Sure, paper can blow away with the wind, or sail downstream, or ash inside a flame. But where paper remains, so do irreducible parts of ourselves.
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not,” Joan Didion wrote. We might also, I think, be well advised to honor the paper that both tethers us to the people we’ve been and encourages us to remember anew. We might be well advised to go back in time, with paper as our guide.
I’d long forgotten, for example, that it was my father who had organized my wedding all those years ago. My father who had planned out the guest lists and doubled down on the spreadsheets and written the checks for the limousine driver, the florist, and the band in his inimitable engineer’s hand. My father who had meticulously tucked the entire affair into the manila envelope that, sitting on the floor that day, I suddenly held in my hand. The words my father had written to bless my marriage were there, on a folded index card. The notes he’d made about the gifts my husband and I had received — all there, written out on behalf of a daughter too self-absorbed, perhaps, back then, to see or fully appreciate all that he had done.
I’d forgotten, too, the bends and breaks in my son’s early crayon writing — how his Happy Mother’s Day tilted up and down the cards he’d made — but there his cards were. I’d forgotten my own childhood propensity for tilted letters and exaggerated tales, but there were plenty of those in the sprawl as well — first- and secondand third-grade Beth homework papers that, I’m sure, tested the patience of the teachers who collected and read and returned them to me, so that I could give them to my mother, so that she might preserve them for me, so that I might someday find them in a plastic tub I hadn’t touched since I’d dragged it home years before and abandoned it to my office floor.
Humans began making paper centuries ago — collecting hemp, wheat straw, the inner flesh of the mulberry tree, old aprons and shirts and so many other things; pounding the material until the cellulose fibers were loose; floating the released fibers in watery vats; and dipping into those vats with molds and deckles. The water drained. A network of hydrogen bonds formed. Paper and all its possibilities were now in hand — a lightweight purveyor of decrees, romance, and evidence.
Later, of course, the machines would emerge — the mechanical, chemical, environmentally injurious pulping and processing of wood chips and other fibers.
The industrial manufacturing of paper made the stuff commonplace, which is to say that the miraculous nature of paper — its origins, its power, its quiet seductions — was harder to locate in all those millions of reams, and in the sounds, the smells, and the collateral damage of its making.
But it’s still there. The miracle of paper remains. We can write our love on it. We can hold our years on it. We can sit among it on a cold, messy floor and recall what mattered once and matters still — our father’s grace, our mother’s hopes, our child’s gifts, our own emergence into the people we’ve become.