library musings

After having spent a sufficient 6 hours in the British Library today, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is something magical about old books and manuscripts. I held a book today that was 100 years old, a pamphlet that was 130 years old, and an original copy of a letter, handwritten in 1783. Yes you read that right, 1783, which would make it 224 years old. Everything I looked through today had the most incredible musty smell. Gross, possibly to some. But it was amazing. Holding another letter from 1907, I could feel the writer, and I felt like I knew her. I laughed at the pronunciation key she gave to her reader for the name Premanand (“you say ‘pray’ shortly, then mà, with a great deal of emphasis, then ‘nun’ shortly, and stick in a ‘d’ at the end! Now, do you think you know how to say it?”).

It’s funny how once you’re gone, people can read your mail. It really suits the nosey neighbor in me, but something about it is just strange. But this very independent missionary woman, Marie Elizabeth Hayes, is doing wonders for my grade in my general studies course. Because of her attempts to explain her daily life to her colleagues at St Stephen’s Hospital in Delhi, I understand so much more about the lives of Indian women and British women in India during imperialism.

Sitting here, (I’m writing this in a Word document to transfer to my blog later because we don’t get wireless in the Library.) I started thinking about the sorts of things that people will want to study about us. What will we leave behind? Well, if my current form of communication with you is any indication, it won’t be paper. How different it will be for a student, perhaps studying the study abroad practices of American girls in London during the early 21^st century, to read my letters. All of them are electronic. She, or he, will get a big diskette or whatever, and will just scroll down through. Nothing will be tangible, there will be no musty smells, they won’t be able to see my handwriting. There is something incredibly personal about reading a handwritten letter. You can almost picture the person writing it. You can almost see them forming each letter, dotting every I and crossing every T, to be cliché. Historians of the future most like will not have the same experience with letters and journals of today. They’re all emails and blogs.

It’s a very funny thing to hold something older than, well dirt, and think about how there will be very few things like that of yours to exist after you do. These letters of Marie Hayes’ enable her to live long after she died in 1908. She unwittingly gained immortality simply by scrawling a few observations, condolences and sentiments. Pretty cool, if you ask me.