Drawings of Stuff that Never Happened

Second drafts of personal history

As readers of this newsletter know by now, I’ve been taking a deep dive into my own past, swimming through the 6 million-or-so words I’ve written in my daily journals since October 12, 1978. Right, it’s as if a T.Rex—check that, maybe just a water-loving spinosaurus, to keep my metaphor afloat—had been chronicling the days as the ice age descended. I am that dinosaur, noting the ice chunks and chill breezes of the late Cenozoic Era.

“Ou sont les neiges d’anton?” asked the poet Francois Vallon, in 1461, six hundred years before I got around to it. He was looking for a weather report on his past: Where (ou sont) are the snowflakes (les neiges) of yesteryear (d’anton). If the line seems at all familiar, it may be because Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess on Downton Abbey, repeated it in a dour reference to a boy she’d known in her girlhood—as if she’d ever actually been young.

Of course, I know where my old snowflakes lie. I can dig them up from journal entries I made forty years ago,…