I’ve been in the throes of backing up my data lately. Not only that but I’ve been also organizing data from 5 previous back-ups that were conducted over the last 15 years. The process includes weeding out junk files and duplicates of what I intend to keep.
There are moments I wonder if all this work is called for. At the end of the day is any of this stuff of any importance?
Not a lot of folk know this but in the 90’s I was actually hired to inventory the belongings of William Saroyan. Although he was one of Fresno’s favorite sons I was hired to do the job simply because I wasn’t really a fan of his work. I do think he was one of the better short story writers of his generation but I wasn’t crazy about his plays.
Anyway, all this stuff was originally housed in one of the two abodes he owned towards the latter part of his life. Yeah… he needed an entire tract home to house his stuff. When I was hired it had been moved to a cavernous room not unlike the warehouse from “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. (Oh, the stories I could tell…)
Sure, some of the work was actually interesting. I learned more about him through his stuff than I ever wanted to know. Though I have to admit there was a bit of the voyeur involved in this type of work. This mother-lode included unpublished manuscripts, journal entries, galleys of yet to be published works, newspapers, books, knick-knacks… pretty much everything. The man was a pack-rat and he archived everything.
I would come across a pebble with a dated note attached to it, “”found this in Malibu after breakfast” I even came across his catheter with a dated note, “the piss burns like fire.” Every edition in the 7 foot columns of newspapers were signed and dated. He signed and dated everything. (There is more but I’ll spare you the details.)
It just felt sad a pathetic. This was a man who had an illustrious career in the first half of his life. He had known fame and partied with the glitterati of the era. Yet, all I saw around me was a sad and desperate attempt to be remembered after he was gone.
Perhaps he felt his works would not stand the test of time like one of his contemporaries, John Steinbeck, has. I actually came across several rants in his journaling that said so. BTW… I happen to think a couple will… especially “My Name Is Aram“.
That being said… his obsessive dating and archiving has only been seen by a handful of people and that will probably stay that way. Now everything that I catalogued sits in storage somewhere in Stanford University. Most of it is just junk in my opinion.
What I took away from this experience is a resolve to live my own life as fully as I can. Because unless you do… archiving it is sort of moot.