Recording for Posterity

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Earlier this week I went looking for a small bit of information I wrote down nearly ten years ago. I knew I had recorded it sometime in my journal, but now that I have been journaling for fifteen years, I wasn't quite sure where I might find it.

As I skimmed through my drawer full of journals, it seemed strange that there were so many events I did not even vaguely recognize. If it were not for the fact that the incidence was sandwiched between events I did remember, and summarized in my less than model handwriting, I might have thought some other person's journal had gotten mixed in with mine.

I always suspected that when I chronicled an event it was so a future me would be able to remember the details where only a shadow of a memory existed. Of course, for a time I thought I journaled so one hundred years later a distant relation would know what it had been like to be me, but that was before I realized that even a distant relation might be too close.

But now, ten years later, I find I have trouble knowing what it had been like to be me.

If I had known, way back when, how my memories would have slipped away unnoticed, I might have spent more energy cataloging every thought, event, and feeling. But then, of course, it would have taken me much, much longer to find the little detail I did remember carefully recording.

Comments

caedmonstia said…
I have been thinking lately that I am not so sure I want my posterity to know so much about what it is like to be me. I am trying to figure out who I can trust to burn my journals as soon as I die. Or maybe I can do like you see in the movies (Far and Away, for instance) where you die and as your spirit slowly circles higher and higher above your body, you remember: Wait, I forgot to burn my journals! So you sputter back to life for at least a few moments to leave things nicely resolved.
7:31 AM
serapio said…
I thought I had both of these problems solved (finding information in journals and hiding it from posterity) by keeping my journal in an encrypted computer file. But during a period of not journaling, I forgot what the password was. Makes things a little hard to find information.
8:46 PM
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