I try not to over-indulge my nostalgia, but sometimes it's warranted. Looking for records to help fill out my IDT application (my library school GPA from 25 years ago...?), I opened an old box of papers for the first time in many years. No luck with the school records, but the things there were a window into a different universe: dozens of long letters, postcards from vacations, notebooks with scribbles from job and apartment searches, notes passed in high school, college papers typed on onionskin (complete with pencilled-in corrections), and on and on.
In one class we're reading parts of the book Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age (David M. Levy), which has some intensely personal chapters on the paper document. I'd thought he was being a bit romantic, but am now feeling exactly the same. There has been something lost from the age of familiar handwriting, sometimes squeezed into the confines of a carefully-chosen card, its physicality shockingly alive after so many years.
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