When you spend an extended period of months poring over documents, letters, notes, annotations, and so on by a particular author (in my case, a photographer), you really grow to deeply understand their handwriting. At first the learning curve is really steep with all but a precious few excessively careful writers. You spend a lot of time scrutinizing a word, a letter, a phrase, trying to decipher what at first glance looks like a daunting row of squiggles and scribbles. But as you push forward, light bulbs go on and you realize, "Oh, that thing that looks like a Euro symbol before the Euro was actually currency is really a very fanciful "F" and it eventually seems absurd that you couldn't read this stuff in the first place. Then comes the moment when you can intuitively imitate it yourself. And in some strange, slightly quirky way the fact of this makes me, at least, feel very close to a person who I only know through the artifacts he left behind.
This all makes me wonder (worry?) about what the archives of the present generation onward will look like. Or really, what it will be like to look at them. Maybe I'm just a fuddy-duddy to be attached to letters and paper books full of marginalia and the contents of peoples' rolodexes. But I can't imagine that scrolling through e-mails and tweets and hard drives will feel the same or reveal as much about their authors.
