Ever wonder what Albert Einstein was thinking? Now’s your chance to find out.
A university in Israel has digitized and published his personal papers, which you can search online now. I haven’t dared to look yet because I know I’ll get lost for hours reading since Einstein always has fascinated me.
It made me start wondering about how we are entering an age where people won’t be leaving behind a series of personal papers. Gone are the times when we had poets like Emily Dickinson, who left behind notebooks filled with poems that were only published after she died. Most people today don’t create “personal papers.” They’re creating a digital record of themselves. As a Twitter friend pointed out:
@jenconnic No one leaves behind "papers" any more - we leave behind blogs, Twitter timelines, FB pages, forum threads...
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Dave Sacerdote (@davescupboard) March 20, 2012@jenconnic I think of it as a kind of digital immortality. Only harder to track down than papers, because our cloud presence is widespread.
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Dave Sacerdote (@davescupboard) March 20, 2012The access we can have (although more difficult to find, as Dave points out) to someone’s papers today is stupendous. There’s a giant footprint of work on the Internet in blog posts and social media. But there is a certain nostalgia of hanging on to a piece of paper or a journal or a letter.
When I was much younger I had a pen pal in Belgium. We grew to be friends over the years, and it was interesting to learn about her culture while she learned about mine. And there was a certain excitement to finding the air mail envelope in the mailbox. I’ve held on to those letters (somewhere in my parents’ house) since then. I know plenty of women my age who had similar experiences and how rewarding it was for all of us. You don’t see that any more today.
Not to mention the notebooks I filled with awful poetry and journal entries through my teen years. What angsty teenage girl in the mid 1990s didn’t do something similar while she was listening to Kurt Cobain? And slam books were a bit of a rage during my middle and high school years too.
There’s plenty to learn from those papers too beyond just the words on the pages. We can see the thought process of the person who was doing the writing. Plus there’s something about seeing someone’s handwriting that can be magical. Your handwriting is much like a fingerprint, but so much more. Your writing changes with your mood. It can be a window into your soul of how you were feeling at the moment the words went on the page.
I know plenty of people who still write quite a bit in journals, like a good writer friend who frequently comments here. I carry a journal to write down thoughts, ideas and inspirations. But I rarely actually do writing in my journal. Nor do I write out my daily thoughts in a journal (although I know I probably should). Facebook (and to a lesser extent, Twitter) can be more of a journal of my life than my actual journals.
It’s probably for the best for us to move to be more digital as it’s better for the environment and so much more can be stored. But I feel like some of the magic of seeing someone’s personal papers is gone. There’s something much more personal in seeing someone’s handwriting over reading their type-written words on a screen.
Update: Reuters has an interesting article on this very topic. It talks about how Twitter doesn’t allow us access to our older tweets. It raises some interesting questions. What do you think?
