What is Anachronism?

(Note: Congratulations to Kim, who won last week's theme guessing competition. Her prize was a pygmy hippo. This week's post provides a whole new chance to win. Simply put your thoughts in comments below as to what theme I chose for the pictures and what they have to do with the subject of today's post. )

It was a sunny autumn afternoon in Cincinnati, the autumn of 2009, my quarter of courses as a PhD student. On this particular afternoon, I was hurrying across campus with a fellow grad student, Theresa. We were on our way to Langsam library to stock up on required reading materials. As we walked past Tangemann University Center, the clock tower began to strike three o’ clock in the afternoon. According to my cell phone, though, which is correct according to atomic time, it was only 2:52 PM. Somehow, this discrepancy made me ill at ease—even though I knew the atomically correct time, Tangemann’s clock was also correct in the sense that it was publicly displayed for the whole university. I was further agitated by the descrepance because Theresa and I were both supposed to be in class at 3PM, and I really hoped the professor was going by atomic rather than analogue time. 

As is often the case when one is a historian, or at least a historian-in-training, perplexing questions about present conditions caused me to wonder about the past, specifically my specialty: early modern Europe and Germany (1450-1700, roughly).

                “I wonder what people thought about time in the 17^th century,” I turned to Theresa, as she responded with a puzzled glance.

                “Probably what most people think about time, you know ‘what time is it?’” She responded.

                But by the time we reached the library, I realized they couldn’t have thought the same thing about time that we do. They didn’t have clocks that were accurate, and too many people lived outside cities, so they weren’t governed by the clocktower. People used sundials and hourglasses. They didn’t even have the same calendar acrossed all of Europe.

                “But that’s just it, Theresa, what time is it, really?” I asked her.

                “It’s almost three, Cole. And we’re late,” She sighed as we cuddled into the revolving door at the library entrance, which is always sort of awkward.

                “I think I’m going to write my dissertation about that,” I told her, smiling brightly. She laughed.

                Nearly three years later, and many changes, edited proposal drafts, research questions and papers and readings and head-bangings later, I’m in the thick of that dissertation. And I can tell you, as universal as time may seem, there are few greater mysteries in this world than it.

St Mary's Church in Wolfenbuettel. Construction for this building began in 1608--it was the first signifiant structure to originally be built as a Lutheran church in Germany (rather than merely converting a Catholic church into a Lutheran one).

The first time I learned the word anachronism was studying for my GREs, the exam one takes to enter grad school (similar to the LSATs for law school). I was studying vocabulary, and to learn the massive lists in the study book, I once tried setting a bunch of the words to music. I only remember one line to the entire song:
           Anachronism means "misplaced in time"
           like the iconoclastics in a new world of plastic.

Now, the anachronism part I get, but I have no idea why that line about plastic would help me remember the meaning of iconoclasm, which means to destroy religious images by crashing or smashing them. I think it had to do with how out of place people who practice iconoclasm feel be in a modern context, where everything is made out of plastic. It is really hard to smash things when they are made out of plastic. Better go back to the middle ages, guys.  You are ANACHRONISMS in this world that subsists on petroleum based structural substances. Desist, I say!

This is how my mind works.

Speaking of icons, now you can have Christ close to you at all times. He watches over the world, and the minute hand, all at once. I'm not sure if it's significantly symbolic that this watch has long stopped working. Circa 1600.

Besides the extremely kind librarian staff, the first person I had an actual conversation with the first day working at the library was Z. And the first thing Z. ever said to me, I kid you not, was “I hate anachronism.” She knew nothing about me, about my blog, about my secret love affair with that word. She just looked up from her computer screen and unfurled one of my all-time favorite words like a red carpet. That is when I knew I belonged in Wolfenbüttel, because it is full of historians, and historians are always worried about time.

“Are you a telepathic guardian angel sent here from heaven to comfort me with the salve of mellifluent time-centered words?” I wanted to ask Z., but before I could, she continued her thought. It turns out, she had been reading something online, which reminded her that she resents how a lot of historians don’t do good history, especially the Reformationists—she said this, probably not knowing I myself am being trained as a Reformationist.

“People just don’t bring the proper amount of nuance to things,” she said. “They just make very simplistic arguments, it’s quite frustrating. But I guess I’m just picky. I hate anachronisms. Someone told me I have anachrophobia.”

“A fear of mixing up the order of time?” I asked her, of course highly interested.

“Of course not, I mean a hatred,” she said. “A hatred for other people mixing up the order of time,” Her eyebrows raised sternly.

And suddenly I felt lost, not lost in time, but lost in the correct use of Greek root words. Last time I checked, phobia comes from phobos, which means to fear. Yes, we usually hate the things we fear—for example, I both hate and fear those Japanese lady bug beetles. Ugh!

But, I think what Z. was talking about was antí-pathos/e­ía, which in its anglicized form (antipathy) means strong aversion or hatred to something. I wish I hated anachronisms, too, because then I could describe myself as anachronantipathetic, which just seems like it could be really intriguing to people.

As it stands, anachronism is something of a hobby of mine.

The majority of this week was spent creating my own catalogue of the HAB catalogue. You see, there is so much material here that it is necessary to create my own database of sources I want to work with so that I know what to come back to in the future. Even though it takes a long time to do, it’s important, because otherwise I’m just forever picking and chosing what to work on next without having a large overview of everything that’s available, so that I can prioritize. In other words, I had to go through all the catalogues of the HAB with a more or less fine toothed comb, and type the bibliographic information for every important source into my computer.

 In case this doesn’t sound like the most tedious pastime possible in world history (and that’s coming from a historian), allow me to clarify through more painstaking elaboration.

Before arriving here, I was already overhwelmed by how many primary sources there are to work with at this library from the early modern period (1450-1750). As I had applied for scholarships from this library several times in the past, I was quite familiar with their online catalogue, which lists their holdings and collections. I was already wondering where on earth I would start with it all, how I would manage to survive the flood of sources without drowning. 

Then, at the beginning of this week, I had the customary meeting with the head of the archive to discuss my topic in person. This meeting is very important, because as I explained previously, archives are messy places to be. There are all kinds of nooks and crannies in archives, all kinds of idiosyncratic ways that documents have been stored and organized and catalogued. The head archivist is always the person who knows the archive best, who has the whole thing internalized on some inter-cerebral USB card.

“Have you looked in the card catalogue?” The head archivist asked me.

“Oh, yes. I’ve looked at the online catalogue many times,” I explained, ready to pull out my index of sources I had been looking at.

“No, no,” she smiled. “The card catalogue. On the second floor. Have you been there yet?”

“There is a card catalogue?” I asked her. “Like… You mean, with cards? Paper ones?”

“Yes, well, more like card stock, not paper,” she laughed. “We don’t have one card catalogue. We have three. And I think you will be very pleased by what you find there.” She smiled, as though enchanted by this news.

“But, that stuff is all online, right? That’s the same thing as the online catalogue, just a back up or something, right?” My heart was beginning to race. I kept wanting to peer over my shoulder to see if there was a tsunami coming. A tsunami of sources.

“Oh, no,” she smiled heartily. “Oh, no, these card catalogues were arranged in the 19^th century. They are so systematic and so much work went into them, we haven’t seen a need to touch them yet.”

The next day, after sort of wandering about the library in a depressed stupor as I melancholically ruminated over the amount of work that lay before me, I finally sucked up enough courage to enter the room of card catalogues.

As my weapon of choice, I brought my gun (computer) which I stowed safely in its holster (computer bag), only to be used when explicitly challenged to a duel. I didn’t have to wait long. In the room sat about six long rows of card catalogue drawers. Them was fightin’ words, in and of themselves.

“This archive ain’t big enough for the both of us,” I whispered, fretfully pulling my gun out of its holster. “I didn’t want to have to resort to this, but a man’s got no choice. I’ma gonn’ hafta shoot you.”

And with that, I entered my first index card into the computer. Bam. Several days and several hundred sources later, I’m not finished. But at least, if I die, I will at least be able to say that I know most of the sources in the HAB that would be relevant to look at regarding perceptions of time, calendars, nature, the heavens and sundry other boolean keywords.

Enjoying a saturday afternoon with a (decaf) coffee from a bakery  that found a canister of decaf in some back closet or other.

The other day I was walking through the “old city,” the quaint historical part of Wolfenbuettel where I live and work, and beheld a mother feeding her child with a bottle. I want to say the bottle was filled with a latte or café au lait, because it was darker than normal milk, and also the baby was quite energetic—wailing and such. Obviously it was being caffeinated. It all seemed out of synch with the right chronological developmental phases of a person’s life. I could be wrong, but generally I perceive the consuming-caffeine phase of one’s existence proceding the learning-to-write-term-papers-at-3AM-phase, much less the learning-to-walk phase. The Germans, however, evidently feel differently on the topic.

Granted, it is highly likely that this episode was the hallucination of a caffeine-deprived, mentally-exhausted lass who is trapped in the witch’s tower of an archaic library all day.

Nonetheless, when the topic of Germany infiltrates my conversations with fellow yankees, people often comment on how much beer I can enjoy when I’m there, because there is supposedly really good beer here. Well, I don’t imbibe a huge amount of alchohol and when I do, I’m more a dignified glass of wine kinda gal—and make it a cool Riesling, bitt’ schön. But what I want to say is that, as crazy as the Germans are about their beer, they are even crazier about coffee. I am convinced now more than ever that it would be easier to be a recovering alcoholic in this country than a recovering caffeine addict.

Here is a rundown of the average day in the life of one such poor individual:

A typical walk through the cobblestoned village, say from a hypothetical apartment to a hypothetical archive (a half mile—and that’s taking the long way), one will pass no less than seven cafes. All of them have chairs outside, open doors, and the smell of coffee emanating from them so that pretty much the whole walk is profanely censed by the smell of the drink.

If one happens to be working at aforestated archive, one will be conscripted every working day to attend a mandatory coffee hour at 1:30PM, where colleagues are to formally gather around cups of coffee and informally discuss their day, work, research, and all manner of scholarly life—to the odor de toilette of coffee, coffee, coffee. Should one try to opt out of coffee hour, perhaps to forego the temptation of wanting to drink coffee, Should one “forget” to go, on account of “losing track of time” due to “working,” (or just trying to forego the temptation of trying not to drink coffee), one will be gently nudged by the surrounding arsenal of archivalry to “go to coffee.” Hey, they archivists need their coffee break too.

And the coffee will follow you around every corner: the break room (not the same room as mandatory coffee room), the walk home, the grocery store, the sewer ( I don’t know this for sure, I’m just guessing most of the pipes down there carry coffee).

I am thus convinved the Germans are communally addicted to coffee, and in order to cover up their shame, they codependently coerce everyone else into their addiction.

“Drink decaf,” you are probably saying in your head. Ha. A brilliant bit of advice, where it not for a particular habit possessed by the vast majority of Germans who, feigning ignorance, pretend never to have heard the German word for decaffeinated (entkoffinierten) coffee.I had to painstakingly explain what the term meant to a German colleague the other day, which I find completely ludicrious seeing as though it is plainly obvious what the term means even to a non-native speaker: “ent” meaning de- or un-, and “koffiniert” meaning caffeine.

                “But why would you want to drink that kind of coffee,” she finally asked me, as though we were talking about the bubonic plague, which I had recently opted to become infected with. As the conversation progressed, she deliberately feigned to have any understanding of the effects of caffeine on the body. “You’re making that up. Caffeine doesn’t make people stay up at night.”

So, I’ve come up with a final solution. This weekend I’m buying some nicotene patches—I won’t give in to this coffee pressure.

Gnomonics: The art or science of dialing, or of constructing dials to show the hour of the day by the shadow of a gnomon, or the raised part of a sundial that casts the shadow.

It’s always easy for me to tell when I’ve become settled in a new place, because I make sure all my clocks or watches are turned to the new time zone. Most people do this on the plane, in the car, or sometimes even before leaving for the new destination. Not me. Time and I have an odd relationship to one another.

When I moved to Cincinnati nearly five years ago, I relocated in the time-space continuum exactly one time zone ahead of my native Wisconsin. Excepting my cellphone, whose digital chronometry automatically portalled itself instantaneously as I and my furniture-laden trailer crossed the Central-Eastern intergalactic time zone barrier, the rest of my time keeping devices stayed on Wisconsin time for, well, quite some time. This remained so for weeks even, perhaps several months, I don’t remember. For the duration of these weeks, I flagrantly associated the eastern time zone with everything I hated about living in Cincinnati: the chili, the humidity, the exhausting hills, the lack of sensible cheddar cheese. I clung to the central time zone as the last bit of tangible connection to everything I missed back in Wisconsin. After many nights of tears shed over bowls of gross, cinnamon-esque chili, I finally went around and switched all my clocks, watches, and electronic devices to Cincinnati time. Perhaps I’d finally come to terms with living in the Queen City, perhaps I’d finally faced reality: I was for some unfathomable reason showing up approximately sixty minutes late for everything. In any case, it was a grief stricken endeavor, this final act of saying goodbye to Wisconsin. I was, alas, a dweller of the eastern standard time zone (EST). (Footnote: a really fun thing to do when filling out forms would be to list one’s time zone as an official suffix to one’s name, in the same way that many of my colleagues list the abbreviation of their respective degrees: e.g. Cole Lyon, EST.)

It started getting a bit tricky once I’d lived in Cincinnati a few years and got used to my existential identity as a citizen of the EST space-time continuum. Each time upon driving into Wisconsin, I’d engage in an ethical struggle: do I reset the clock in my car or not? Usually, I couldn’t bear to turn the clock in my car back an hour for some reason. It just felt comforting to know when people in Cincinnati were getting up, going to work, sitting in church, eating chili with one another. Most of the time in Wisconsin, my car stays set on Cincy time, my cell phone on Wisconsin time, and my watches change depending on my whim. Thus, I spend my vacations deliciously trapped between two time zones, or perhaps more than trapped, I simply prefer to have one foot in each. I won’t ever be omnipresent, only God can do that. But can’t a girl at least try to be omnitemporal?

I am somewhere in the middle of this liminal, middle stage of switching time zones. Weird things happen to cell phones’ chronometry on planes, I think that’s why the stewardesses always make sure you’ve turned them off. They don’t want the time-related secrets of the universe to be unlocked to us mere mortals, should we spend the seven hour flight staring at the clock faces of our cell phones while crossing more time zones in one day than should be humanly possible.  So, for the longest time (i.e. about an hour after landing in Frankfurt), my cell phone was mysteriously trapped in time, stuck on 3AM. When I put my German SIM card in it, within a fraction of a second, time itself to 11:15 AM. It was, indeed, a noble moment to behold.

My computer decidedly remains set to Cincinnati time—endearingly so. As I work in the mornings I think of sleepy little United States. I think of my friends, snuggled in their beds. I think of certain cats I know, meowing at my bedroom door driven by gluttonous habit. Sometimes I think of calling people for a fun joke. And so, my computer remains my only temporal link with the past.

Three times the other day, working in the archive as I looked at my computer screen, I got really frustrated that it was only 4:34 AM, because I automatically have to count 6 hrs ahead in my mind to see how long I’ve been working, and I am really bad at mental math. Instinctively, I went into the control panel to change the time, and I couldn’t (emotionally). I know someday I will be driven to it. Inevitably, one day I shall arrive six hours late for work, and get some nasty stares from the librarians, and I will say to heck with Cincinnati time. I will march up to that control panel and show it who’s boss, I will wrestle this blasted time-space codependency issue to the ground. Afterwards, I will shed a few tears or two, I will relish in the pathos of this life, whose duration is characterized by so many distances and spaces and chasms in the fabric of the universe. I will mourn, with Rilke’s poem, “Oh, the sadness of things far removed… I do believe the star, shining upon my face, has been dead for thousands of years.” And then I will rise, having come to terms of my inability to be omnitemporal while trapped in this blasted earthly canopy. I will be reborn into gratitude that, if I must in fact be momentarily misplaced in time, I can at least do so in the land of abundant and precise clocks, waches and sundials…

But until then, I am and evershall remain,

(EST-EDT)-ly yours,

Cole Marie, UTC -05

What is an Archive?

(NOTE: before you read this, there's something you should know. When I make posts, it is my intention to equip them with pictures. Now, the pictures may seem random. But every post where there are pictures, there will be a theme behind all of the pictures. The theme relates to the topic of the post in a direct, symbolic,  metaphorical or purely irrational way.  If you are reading this, I challenge you to try to answer two questions in the comments: a.) what you think the theme of the pictures is; and b.) how that theme relates to the topic of the post. Whoever gets the right answer first will win.)

It’s a simple question, really. A look-up-in-the-dictionary-able answer. After all, I’ve been to archives, I know what they look like on the inside, I even know what they generally smell like.  For some unfathomable reason, however, whenever this question was posed to me in the weeks leading up to my research trip, I found myself bumbling around like a third grader who was called out of her daydreaming by teacher to answer the math problem in the book.

Now that I am here in Germany, getting settled and planning my research strategy, I’m ruminating upon the subject of archives and why they are so difficult to explain. I mean, they aren’t easy to understand—even as historians. Thinking too hard about what an archive is or isn’t is a little bit like saying the same word over and over until you wonder whether it is a word at all.

Archive. Archive. Archive. Archive.

See?

Treasure Trove of books at the HAB.

(I am not allowed to take pictures of the archive, so I have included pictures from websites for some of these. All of the ones that are not hyper linked are my own.)

By coincidence, the Herzog AugustBibliothek  [i] here in Wolfenbüttel was the first archive I ever visited. It was four years ago, before I had even decided I wanted to become a historian, let alone started my training as one. I was in Germany for the end of the summer, and decided to stop in and visit K., another graduate student from my university in Cincinnat. K. was becoming a historian.

At one point, she asked if I wanted to see the archive. As we walked into the garderobe, there were important-looking signs all over that were chock full of the word “verboten!” (forbidden). Pens. Cameras. Cell phones (cell phones have cameras. Now they are allowed but at the time, they weren’t.) I seem to recall one rule which instructed users how to breathe properly, so that no miniscule water-condensation got on the sources—I know I’ve seen that one somewhere.

There was a random door in the Garerobe. “Is that were the UN Security Council meets?” I asked K.

“No, I think that’s another door to where the archivists are,” she explained. Oh.

I don’t remember much, except when Kelly showed me one of the sources she was working with, a 16^th-century calendar. We wore white gloves. The entire reading room, though filled with other scholars, was quiet as they worked.

“But this is a facsimile, right?” I asked Kelly. “I mean, they can’t really keep books and stuff preserved for that long.”

She shook her head and explained that the HAB had sources that were from the twelfth or thirteenth century, possibly even older but she wasn’t sure.

Within only a few months, I was starting to work towards entering a History program for my PhD.

I call these "Love Lox." There is a bridge I cross each day on my way to the HAB, and the posts are adorned with chains full of padlocks. It is beautiful--the locks are all different colors and the horizontal railings above them have flower boxes full of blooming marigolds and other flowers. I finally took a closer look and realized that each lock has the name of a couple engraved into it--sort of like carving the initials of your beloved into a tree. Don't miss the ducks in the river! :)

When one gets to using the word “archive” in everyday speech, it seems like people don’t quite understand the word. They appear to grow wide eyed and fearful, as though I am discussing an exotic species of buildings rarely seen in the wild. In reality, however, the jungle of our society is pocketed with nooks and crannies wherein lie our overgrown repositories of the past. Many large companies and firms have rooms set aside for the archiving of past correspondences, contracts, budgets, employee records, and items of a similar nature. The same is true for hospitals, schools, churches, synagogues, libraries and public venues like opera houses and theaters. These rooms or wings or even entire buildings are hardly marked for public passersby, because records by their very nature are supposed to be private—but, I assure you, they are there. In fact, there could be an archive behind that door. Or that one. Or even that one over there. Not this one, here, though—that’s where the Security Council meets. I advise always being on one’s guard—one can never be too careful in a world full of archives.

"A bookworm at work."

One of my tasks my first day actually working this week was attending what I thought was a mandatory lecture. Turns out, it was not mandatory at all, and was actually for the resident curators rather than for the guest historians and scholars. Imagine my chagrin upon hearing the title: “Dirty or Clean: Questions in Preservation Science.”  I reminded my jet lagged self not to groan audibly.

Lo and behold, it was an extremely fascinating lecture given by a spritely preservationist from Vienna, about my age. Her main point was that old documents are dirty, but when is it ethical to remove dirt in preserving documents? It used to be that preservationists were taught to get documents as clean as possible. Now, though, new ideas have come into the field which recognize that dirt can actually serve a purpose and in many cases should not be removed. Sometimes cleaning documents, for example, actually makes them cleaner and whiter than they would have been in the first place. Other times, cleaning them removes a microscopic layer off the top of the paper and ink. Both of these options destroys the integrity of the document, that is, the closeness they bear to their original forms once upon a time. Still other times, dirt actually gives us more information about the document itself. Dirt or earth trapped between pages can now be tested biologically and in some cases, help scientists determine whence the document originated. Wax from ecclesiastical candles dripped onto documents helps us understand how documents have been read in the intervening centuries.

In a related way, however, dirt can actually help preserve a document. Dirt—from fingerprints, soil or dust—over time fills in the microscopic cracks and ridges on the surface of the paper. Removing it re-exposes that rough surface to the air in the same way that removing trees from a field leaves the field open to wind. The wind over time will lead to soil erosion. A certain amount of dirt actually keeps the paper intact.

When you think about it, it is our dirt, the dirt of the present, that keeps the past intact. And arguably, it is also the past’s pull on us that keeps us intact. We keep tugging on each other, interacting with each other, the past and the present—we save one another from obsoleteness, erosion and or being bleached of true identity.

The a randomly beautiful window of a house I also walk past, near the love locks bridge.

If you look up “archive” in a dictionary, the definition will likely refer to three elements: documents, government, and a place of storage. One is apt to conclude that an archive is a place where public documents are stored. Simple enough, right?

Not quite. We are not just talking about any old documents, but particularly past documents. Documents are from the past when they have ceased to be necessary for current use or potential use in the future.  This is a tricky point:  any document is technically a record of something that happened in the past, right? I mean, unless the iPad comes out with an app that lets you write documents of the future.

Archives are our labratories in which we test the voices of the past, they are our hospitals in which we take care of the past, they are our studios where we come the closest we can get to what came before us. They are dusty (within two hours of working the first day, I had to run to the pharmacy across the street for some allergy medicine), they are hedged in with rules and gate-keeping, they are full of documents in Latin and other obscure languages… But, just think: at the Herzog August Bibliothek, for example, I can look at documents from the twelfth century if I so desire. Even if I understand nothing on the page, even if I am stifling sneezes, and even if I’m not allowed to take a pen anywhere on the premises: the hand which wrote that page belonged to another living, breathing human being nearly a millennium ago. It might not make for a sensationalist movie, but it at least makes for some pretty humbling moments. It also makes me value living in the present—trust me, penmanship has definitely improved since the middle ages.

The view outside my bedroom window. I think this is facing north.

In the broadest sense, we all leave the makings for an archive behind us when we die—or even in the process of living. Our lives, it could be argued, are living repositories.

I had to archive my room when I was packing to come here. I had to go through an amalgam of possessions to sort and decide what was necessary to bring, what was not. Then there was the cramming of these supposedly useful things into a suitcase.

When I arrived here, my first night, I opened that suitcase. There were layers of items packed in a tediously organized way: socks, running panths, a case of jewelry, some travel documents (why weren’t these on my carry on?), neatly folded pants (that had nonetheless become wrinkly)…

I had left the US with a suitcase full of things. I arrived in Germany with an archive of my life from back home.

What the dictionary doesn’t mention about archives is how chaotic they can be sometimes. To be honest, they are an absolute mess—not in the way that pigsties are, or dirty sinks, or muddy shoes. No, archives are messy in the way that life is, in the way that relationships are, in the way that crisscrossed footpaths leading up a mountain are sometimes too convoluted to map out.

My friend Rebecca, the Anglican who has cooked for me too many wonderful Swedish pancakes for me to conscionably continue teasing about the whole Henry VIII issue, has been spending a great deal of her weekends up north at her grandparent’s house these days. They are selling the big family house and opting for a smaller, more manageable place; Rebecca and her sisters are helping them clean and get rid of things.  It is an exhausting job, not just because her grandparents have accumulated a lot of possessions over the decades, but because the past is a sinuous and laborious organism: dismantling it is like trying to untangle a snarl in a 5-year-old tomboy’s hair.

“The other day, my sister and I were going through one of the upstairs closets full of old dress clothes to take to goodwill,” Rebecca told me one afternoon shortly before I left for Germany. “Clothes we have never seen before, because my grandparents stopped wearing them. We found out only later that, by accident, we had taken my dad’s only suit he owns to goodwill. He just happened to keep it in that closet, because it was a dressy outfit like the rest of my grandparent’s clothes in that closet.”

Rebecca tells me these stories, and she tells me about all the things in her grandparent’s basement and attic, all the things they have to go through and say good bye to. When she is cataloguing these memories aloud, she has a distant look in her eye as though she is walking through a museum for the last time. But, instead of a museum, all I can think is what an archive that house is. Unlike a museum, an archive is the raw, undigested material of the past. This raw material randomly collects together, like felled logs being sent down a river. As the past accumulates haphazardly, it remains in a perpetual state of sorting, ordering, gathering, piling, shelving, forgetting, dust collecting. There are shelves upon shelves upon storerooms upon vaults of historic material that have never yet been ascertained by professionals and most archives are like Rebecca’s grandparent’s house multiplied by an entire society.

If you ever get lost in a museum, just read the placard or listen to the audio tour you paid $5 extra for. In an archive, though, you’re not going to get an audio tour. In fact, you might get so lost in the closet full of clothes you never saw before, only to risk overlooking the one part of the story worth snatching up for future use.    

This is not from Wolfenbuettel. I took this picture last year in Nuremberg, when I was also researching. It was an exhibit of medieval astrolabes hanging on plexi glass with a large, open, sunlit area behind.

---

[i] Technically, the Herzog August is classified as a library, not an archive. I still have not figured out the difference, but perhaps someday I will. As far as I can tell, they have the same types of rare and printed material that an archive has. I guess originally, you could check the rare books out. Nowadays, in order to use the rare books part of the library, you need to be registered with the library’s office of historical scientists (Geschichtswissenschaftler). This means a lot of things, one of which is that I get a really neat nametag to wear whenever I am working, which reads: “Nicole Marie Lyon, scientist” in German. Unfortunately I forgot my microscope and beakers in the states.

The Prognosis

One night, shortly before Lent, I awoke in a cold sweat. Staring into the silent darkness of my bedroom, the memory of my doctor’s words lingered hauntingly around me like the cold fingers of a nocturnal apparition: “You are dying of throat cancer. You only have six weeks. If I were you, I would start to get my affairs in order.” Gasping, my hands reached to my throat, only to realize there was in fact no tennis-ball sized lump protruding from my neck. Thank God, it was just a dream, I thought, shrugging the eeriness of it all off as I settled back into bed.

~*~

A few days later, I sat down for breakfast with my roommate, both of us checking our email before heading off to work. As I bit into a piece of grilled tofu with mustard (why I was eating this for breakfast, I don't know. I had been craving it.), a message popped into my inbox with foreign accolades. It was from a secretary of a rare books library in Germany, one to which I had applied for funding to support my dissertation research. Assuming it was yet another email with yet another random question about my application materials ("Why hasn't your institution sent us your transcript  yet?"), I opened the email with a sigh.

"Um... Jenna?" I called my roommate over to my computer.

"Yeah?"

"I think I'm going to Germany," I told her, both of us staring at each other.

"Seriously? When?"

I skimmed the email again, trying to make sense of it all. I had gotten so many denial letters in German the last two years, that I was having difficulty understanding the vocabulary of acceptance.

"A little over six weeks," I said. "April 15th."

In the days following the throat cancer dream, I received three more similar acceptance letters, the research funding piling on top of itself in an unnerving fashion--like a cup about to overflow with water. After two years of rejection letters, the one acceptance letter would have sufficed. But no, life had to go and bring me FOUR acceptance letters in a very short period of time. Life had to go and give me not four months of research funding abroad, but nearly two years. Just when I had grown content with the prospect of possibly never finishing my dissertation, just when I had started growing hopeful at other prospects, Life had to go and turn my life on a dime.

~*~

“It is kind of amazing when real time lines up with sacred time, whatever ‘sacred time’ is,” my friend Rebecca, a law student with an M. Div. from Yale, commented. She is Anglican; I am Eastern Orthodox. What we don't have in common, we tease each other about--I tease her about Henry VIII, she teases me about crossing myself backwards. This all prevents us from putting more faith in our respective churches, which are still comprised of humans, rather than in God Who is merciful and mysterious. (But on the scale of frail humanity, I'd rather cross myself backwards than... well... never mind. Hi Rebecca!)

We had been discussing the coming weeks, and my upcoming departure from Germany.

“What do you mean?” I asked her.

“I mean, you found out about the first fellowship for your research funding in Germany right before Lent started for you, in the Orthodox Church,”[1] she said. “And you’re leaving the states the morning after Easter, right?”

“Well, yeah…” I nodded. 

“So, that’s a perfect six weeks. You’re getting ready for the Resurrection and Germany at the same time. A season of waiting, of preparing oneself,” she smiled. “That's a gift from God, Cole. Perfect timing.”

~*~

And so, the six weeks of Lent found me swept up in the sacred discipline of “preparing oneself,” as Rebecca said, or “putting my affairs in order” as my doctor suggested in the dream. Suddenly, had to think about a lot all at once. Who would take care of my car, and did it need an oil change? What about my apartment? Taxes? Insurance? Bank accounts?

And those were just the easy items on my to do list. Further down the list, I had to start making the rounds and saying goodbye to people, to my apartment, to my church, to the last four-and-a-half years I had spent learning how to make a home in Cincinnati, OH. This is a place with a lot of big memories for me. I had started my graduate work here. I ran my first marathon here. I learned to teach here. I bought my first car here. I explored Christianity more here than ever before, ultimately joining the eastern Orthodox Church. I learned Latin and Middle High German here. There had been a lot of joys here, but there had also been a lot of heavy griefs I had learned to bear in this city. I think we form an attachment to places wherein we grieve, possibly even more than to places that remind us only of joy.

I had hated it here at first. In the midst of that animosity, however, it had transformed into something of a home. Even though it was likely I’d be back on and off, this city would never again be quite the home base that it had been these last handful of years.

Suddenly, Lent did not seem long enough; not spiritually, not logistically, not emotionally. I have always loved Lent, even before I observed it I loved the idea of an entire season dedicated to waiting. (This is surprising, considering I am or was one of the most impatient people I know for much of my life. Perhaps these last few years of observing Lent has begun to tame this excess in me, Lord willing.) It is the most beautiful season in the eastern Church, such that we call it not just Lent, but “Great” Lent. It is, according to Fr. Alexander Schmemann, a time of bright sadness—sadness over sin and brokenness, but also joy over the resurrection.  It is a school of remembrance of who we truly are as individuals, as a church, and as humanity. I had never felt more bright and sad at the same time than this Lent.

How to soak all of this up into the core of one’s being in six weeks? It is impossible. But this year, Lent seemed especially not long enough. I suppose, however, that is perhaps not the point. Perhaps the point is to realize that no matter how much time one spends waiting and preparing for anything in life, one finds oneself ultimately unprepared. If a medium-term relocation across the ocean caught me unawares, it’s only natural that the raw reality of God’s intervention in this world on behalf of mankind will always catch one off guard too.

~*~

      “I think we are all just in a very weird phase of life,” my friend Wes told me, offering a general conclusion to our discussion of where we’re at in our respective careers, where our friends are at, who’s married and who’s not, and why, and whether my life will change much with the whole Germany thing.

              

  I thought for a few moments as we walked through the hilltop park near my apartment, watching two squirrels scurry across the road in the crisp, spring morning sun. I thought about Lent, and waiting, and preparing. I thought about what we historians call continuity and discontinuity—the tension between that which changes over time and that which remains the same. And I thought about Wes’ observation.

                

“I think life is just a weird phase of eternity,” I replied to him after a while. “I mean, if you really think about it.”

                

“Indeed,” he laughed.

               

Indeed.

---

[1] Lent in the Eastern Orthodox Church is on a slightly different time table than in western churches that observe the season, such as the Catholic or Lutheran churches. First, we calculate the date of Easter (or “Pascha” as we call it) according to customs of the ancient church, which was expressed in Holy writ at the Council of Nicaea in 325, whereas the western Church over the years has developed a slightly different system for calculating Easter. Neither do we count the week preceding Easter (i.e. Holy Week) as part of Lent. These, along with several other customs that differ in the Eastern Church, make for a slightly longer and offset fasting season in the Eastern Church.