What the Dead Didn't Send You
The one-sided intimacy of reading the dead.
Somewhere in a library, or a county office, or a box bought for a dollar at the end of an estate sale, there is a letter a person wrote to someone who was not you, about a matter that was none of your business, in the belief that the two of them were the only ones who would ever read it. You are reading it. This happens constantly. It is most of what history is made from, and almost no one who does it stops to feel how strange it is.
The dead kept very little back from us in the end, and they kept it back from the wrong people. A woman writes her sister a line she would have died before saying to a neighbor, and a century on it is the neighbor’s kind who are left to read it. The diary locked against a mother lies open to a stranger with a reader’s card. The letter meant to be burned was not burned, and here it is. We have come into a great inheritance of confidences, and not one of them was left to us.
What makes reading the dead unlike any other reading is that it runs one way and cannot be made to run back. I can learn the temper of a person sixty years in the ground, the set of their grievances, the name they used for a place, the thing they could not say and said anyway to the one person they trusted. They can learn nothing of me. They cannot see who is bent over the page. They cannot object to my being there, cannot correct me when I read them wrong, cannot decline to be understood by someone they would not have crossed a street to meet. Every ordinary protection a person keeps over what is known of them, the dead have given up, and they gave it up to no one in particular, which turns out to mean to anyone at all.
This puts the reader in a position of enormous and unearned power. We are unlikely to be cruel to a stranger we never met. We are very likely to find them useful. A stranger’s record is so nearly silent, so unable to push back, that it will hold almost any meaning you press into it. You arrive with a question. The dead did not have your question; they had their own, and theirs is mostly lost. But the record will sit still under your question the way it never once sat still under theirs, and if you are not careful you will read it until it gives you the answer you came for, and call that answer theirs. It is the oldest error in the work and the most human. It is also a kind of theft. You have taken a life that was about itself and made it about you.
I have come to think there is a duty owed to the dead we read, and that it is a strange one, because it cannot be a duty to them. They are past being helped or harmed by anything I do at the page. It is a duty to the fact of them. It asks me to hold two things at once: that this was a whole person, with a life that was its own occasion and not a clue in mine, and that most of that life did not survive and is not coming back through the few papers that did. The papers are what fell off a person and happened to last. They are not the same as the person, and reading them well means never quite losing hold of the difference.
The hardest part is the not-answering, and it is hardest because we are so unused to it now. We can find out nearly anything, and we have started to believe that a thing not yet found is only a thing not yet searched hard enough. The dead correct this, gently, without meaning to. There are questions you can carry to every record a life left behind, and read closely, and read again, and the record will give you the dates and the counts and the shape of a hand, and it will not give you the reason, because the reason was never written down, because the two people who held it between them had no need to set it where a stranger could reach. You can respect that or you can batter at it. Battering does not work, and it is not owed.
So I try to read the dead the way I would want to be read, which is not thoroughly. I would want the person at my page to take what I set down and leave the rest alone, to be slow to say they knew me, to keep a wide margin around everything I did not choose to explain. A record keeps its account whether or not anyone comes to understand it, and understanding is not the thing it asks. It asks to be handled as what it is: the leavings of someone who was here, and did not write to you, and is owed the courtesy of the questions you do not force it to answer.
The Leaving, a serial novel, begins Sunday, July 5. A man comes into the records of a family he never knew, a hill farm’s hundred years of ledgers and maps and letters, and reads them for the one thing they keep back: the reason.
A new chapter every Sunday, for forty-two weeks.
As a fellow serial writer, welcome!