For years, I’ve told people that I started keeping a journal at 13. But when I go back and look, what do I find? I was an elderly 15, already starting high school. That’s the thing about old journals—they have the power to keep your memory honest.

Fifteen? You always hear about artistic types who started being creative when they were 6. But I’ve always been a late bloomer (“Late Boomer,” I joked in my journal), and had only discovered my intellect in the seventh grade, when I had an amazing teacher, Mr. Marinello, whose instruction hit just right. A door crashed open in my brain: Hello, I can really think, and it’s kind of fun, but also rather terrifying!

What to do with all these insights that made my friends, my family, my whole life look strange? Not to mention the legions of insecurities they gave rise to. I was a nerdy, pretentious, emotionally underdeveloped teenager in a very small town. When I finally got around to keeping a journal, I was about to explode. I did it to save my sanity.

I still have that first journal, a dark-green spiral notebook full of rounded, slightly back-slanted printing. Here is part of the inaugural entry:

We have all been competing for the “tiredest of the week” award … [one friend] in particular has been applying herself. I should caution immediately that I am unsuccessfully attempting to exorcise a whopping jealousy of her – please disregard all sarcastic remarks.

This combination of seeing beneath the surface of things and articulating self-knowledge became addictive. Of course, it may have also kept me in my shell longer. But it furnished the shell. I have developed a cozy inner life with comfortable couches, interesting nooks, good views, great art on the walls—and closets stuffed with insecurities that I obsessively let out for air, which keeps them from blowing the whole place to smithereens.

Throughout my adolescence, I clung to my journal. It’s interesting but a little disheartening to read those early notebooks now. Maybe it’s good that we don’t always remember just how raw, how dire, things seem when we’re young. On the other hand, it’s not a bad idea to be in contact with that chubby, self-conscious teenager. “The child is the father of the man,” said Wordsworth. Like it or not, she’s my mother.

My journal followed me to France as a high school exchange student, faithfully lapping up my struggles with a strange language, culture, and family, and a curriculum that expected me to read Kant and Marx (in French!) and graded me for physical ability in P.E. I’ve always remembered proudly that my journal transitioned into French about four months in. But on rereading it, I discovered that this happened directly after a huge blowout with my French family. It came out that they had been mistaking my introversion (always squirreled away in my room, writing in my journal) for cold rudeness. They yelled at me: “You’re so selfish! You never try to be part of the family!” I cried and cried. Jolted into French, my journal described the shell-shocked, and then surprising, aftermath: After tip-toeing around each other for a while, we started developing into the family we had been trying for, and finally joyfully became. Could I have gotten up that steep slope to a real relationship with that family, that culture, without processing it in those pages? Growth is painful; my journal was a midwife.

By college so many things were happening that my journal became a chronicle, a bildungsroman, a satire—or was it a farce? It described in cringing detail a twee tea party I threw. It recorded my first bout with depression: a long, dark sophomore year. It documented the intense friendship that opened me up emotionally, the despair and elation of trying to be good at music, my surprise at liking calculus, my excitement as literature opened up to me—along with my stumbling inability to attempt romantic relationships without drowning in humiliation.

Later, my journal saw me through a flirtation with yuppie-dom and a period of adventurous travel. It helped me achieve that graduate school balance between intellectual exhilaration and disillusionment with academic politics. It got me through the bumpy start of my career as well as the revelation that depression runs in my family and is something that can be dealt with. It took in the richness that suffused my days when I finally met the love of my life.

Gradually, my entries got more spotty. I had work to do; it became harder to take my little life so seriously. But then something happened: I had to teach a three-week intensive class, and I got the idea to make it about keeping a journal. I thought it would be interesting to meet others of the journal-keeping kind and reflect together (in our journals, of course) on what the practice means. And oh my God, it was. We read famous journals together: Samuel Pepys, hoovering up the juicy 17th-century details and delivering a London so rank, energetic, and stuffed with life that you start to recognize how strange your own times are; Anne Frank, brilliant and incisive, a born satirist dropped into an abyss of evil; Edward Abbey, so sexist and egotistical you’d slap him if he didn’t write so gorgeously about nature; May Sarton, heroic voyager of the inner cosmos. What they all have in common is the secret super sauce of journal-keeping: honesty.

We tried writing like them. We did all kinds of creative writing exercises, the wackier the better. We wrote in the woods, in graveyards, on city corners, at the top of towers, in hidden greenhouses. We plumbed our memories, our obsessions, our dreams.  We wrote collaborative poems. Our journals grew rich and fecund. And when we shared our work (only when we wanted to), we discovered a paradox: It is extremely fun to write privately in community.

As the 21st century unfolded, I uncovered another great truth: A journal is not a blog. On a six-month fellowship in Sri Lanka, I thought I might try blogging—to keep the friends and family abreast of my adventures. But I quickly discovered that I did not have the psychic wherewithal to publish a cheerful, or perhaps meaningful and incisive, account of learning my way in a strange culture. Rather, I needed to write privately about the bewilderment and terror that lurks beneath the surface when you skate along in a new culture, looking fine from the outside but not knowing how anything works, or what anybody means, or who the hell you even are in this context. I needed to record that afternoon, one month in, when I stood paralyzed on the steps of a university building for three hours waiting for a ride that never came, staring at my cellphone and trying to contain the seep of tears, while around me flowed groups of people who knew exactly who they were and why they were there. And once I, a 50-year-old professional woman, had gone through that, and written about it—I fell in love with Sri Lanka. My whole life changed, and I opened myself to its richness and complexity. This is what my journal is for: to help me pay attention as life flows by, so that I can live more deeply, grow.

I have kept my journal unfaithfully. I come, I go. I leave it, for weeks or even months. Then I pummel it with insights, gags, dreams, memories, and boring minutiae. I paste in letters, postcards, and doodles. I copy passages I like. I fool around. And when I need it, it takes my mewls of insecurity and dark depressions in its stride. My journal doesn’t care; it opens its pages and welcomes me back, every time. That’s the beauty of a journal. It’s better than a dog. OK, not really, it’s different than a dog, but it is an unwavering friend: it asks only for what is really going on, accepts all, and never dies.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> A Lifetime Spent Journaling appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When I was a child, the border between the natural world and me was so thin it was transparent. I looked into my dog’s eyes and felt that I knew her. I knew I wasn’t a horse, surely, but also, I was a horse—I ate salad for lunch without utensils, galloped down the street, whinnied. I spoke to trees.

Shortly after entering my teenage years, I grew up, grew out of all this, stopped growing. My dreams became human dreams—love, money, career, family. I was never a horse anymore, or a dog, or a cat, or a bird; I only spoke to people. I was a human woman, and an intensely practical one. I had set aside childish ways.

In 2017, decades into my adult life, I stepped in as editor-in-chief of Stone Soup, the magazine of writing and art by kids under 14. While I was a writer and an editor, writing by kids—or for kids, for that matter—was decidedly not in my wheelhouse. In fact, kids were not in my wheelhouse.

Like many other childless adults, I was awkward around them: I forced a smile, asked the usual questions (How old are you? What’s your favorite color?), hesitated to pick them up when they cried. I knew I wasn’t “good with kids”—and watching my husband horse around with his young cousins over Christmas, I wondered if I ever would be.

It never occurred to me that the idea of being “good with kids” was itself a problem. That the phrase implied there was only one way to be “good” with kids, as if all kids liked the same things and had the same interests. That to be “good” with kids, I would need to be someone else around them—not myself. That I would need to lower myself to their level—in the same way that texts are “leveled” to match a child’s reading ability, “reducing exposure to books that might surprise or challenge [them]” in the process.

When I first started reading submissions for Stone Soup, I remember asking myself, Is this good “for a kid”?

Over the next three years, I read thousands of poems, stories, and personal essays by kids, and I looked at hundreds of pieces of their art.

I saw that kids could be wise:

It is said in the Hindu scriptures that only if you open your mind to knowledge will you receive the knowledge. I understand how this can be true. When I was like my parents— not believing God—I didn’t know the things I know today.

That they could make surprising observations, ones that made me see the world a little differently:

[The coin] was a memory from a war of great misery, yet it still gave me a happy feeling. It was as if the memory wanted to be happy.

That they could write rich, imaginative, non-didactic fables and long, moving, complex stories. That they could make me cry. That they could write political allegory. And visionary poems. And poems that haunted me and ones that I wished I’d written.

That they could feel and think and see as deeply, or sometimes, often, more deeply than any adult. Because they were closer to the world: to nature and to animals, to the imagination and the soul. To God—whatever that is.

I realized how wrong, how misguided my initial criteria for acceptance to the magazine had been. That I was not accepting what was good “for a kid” but rather what was good. Period.

In 2020, I became a mother.

At the time, I was living in Santa Cruz, California, a hippie-ish beach town; I was surrounded by mothers who practice RIE and Montessori parenting. Through them, I learned to treat my child, then just a baby, as an individual, a person worthy of my respect.

Before picking her up, I asked for permission. If I needed to interrupt her play, I apologized. When I buckled her into the car seat, I explained where we were going. When she babbled, I listened closely, and replied seriously, so she would know I had heard her, even if I had not understood.

I began to notice how many adults treated children as if they were animals. How they talked about my daughter as if she wasn’t present when she was right there. How they commented on her looks when we walked by—“How adorable! Just beautiful!” How they called her “fussy” when she was simply having a bad day. As if they—those same adults, rolling their eyes at my daughter’s outburst over my choice of snack—had never cried over something similarly trivial that had pushed them over the edge at the end of a long day.

And through all this—parenting and reading and observing—I realized that I could be “good with kids” simply by being myself with them. That this was, in fact, one of the highest forms of respect. There is a reason children identify so closely with animals: They too are treated as Other, and inferior. I began to see how important my newfound approach to kids was in allowing them to feel respected and recognized—and (hopefully) in shaping them into conscientious adults. I began to see my work as a parent and editor as political.

The best way to select work for the magazine, then, was to be myself—to rely on my own literary and artistic sensibilities, and to treat each submission with respect. At Stone Soup, we take kids seriously; we see their art and their ideas as real and worthy. Like most “adult” publications, we don’t accept everyone who submits, in order to uphold the value of the accepted work. Or as one parent wrote in a personal letter to me, “Stone Soup treats young writers like human beings, not intellectually deficient and emotionally fragile adults.”

One day in 2022, a few months after my second child was born, my husband paid me the highest compliment he could have given me: He said until he’d seen me parent, he’d always thought there was only one way to be “good with kids”—to be silly, permissive, and fun. He said I had shown him a different, quieter path. One that is true to who I am.

Now, I watch my daughter whinny and gallop. I watch her talk to rocks and trees. And on days when I am having trouble relating to her, when I feel myself rolling my eyes at her latest outburst, I read submissions for Stone Soup and am reminded that her inner world is as complex as mine. As yours. That we are all of us, animals and humans and dirt and trees and sofas and sky, here together.

The post How I Learned to Be ‘Good With Kids’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The sea is stormy, please help me!

My wings are small, please help me!

The butterflies are afraid, please help me!

My world is ignored, please help me!

Parwana Amiri, a poet from Herat Province, Afghanistan, was 16 years old and living in Ritsona, a refugee camp north of Athens, Greece, when she wrote these words. Her poem “Fly With Me” challenges us to look and beckons us to listen. We do. And we feel her desperation, her hope, her anger. But we also anticipate this narrative. Her words fulfill and breathe life into our expectations of the experiences of a teenager displaced by war. But what happens when we move beyond passively receiving a work like this? What happens when young people, in particular, consider these works with more context—about the artists, their life histories, and even the more mundane aspects of their everyday lives?

Getting past the immediate expression of knee-jerk empathy—as human as that feeling may be—and creating an experience of deep reflection rooted in knowledge and personal connection is a core operating principle of the Stone Soup Refugee Project, which I direct. In collaboration with organizations around the world, we publish young refugee artists in Stone Soup, a literary magazine by and for children, facilitate creative writing workshops, and connect young people living in refugee camps to those living outside of such precarious situations as artists and writers. Through sharing creative works produced under starkly different circumstances, the young people gain dimension and nuance to one another, and move beyond dominant narratives of war and suffering.

Young people, like most of us, approach the art and writing of young refugees from a place of empathy. When we see the tear-streaked face of a father cradling the smiling head of a dismembered body, limbs strewn about while bombs drop debris overhead, in a drawing by a 13-year-old Syrian girl, we feel empathy. When we see 12-year-old Ali’s painting of a lone boat floating beneath a smiling sun on an otherwise empty, rolling sea, its passengers’ stick-figure arms outstretched in desperation, we feel empathy.

Indeed, Jack*, a British participant in our pen pal program, expressed this sentiment in his correspondence with Sammah, a young refugee in Kenya. “I know that you have a hard life. You must be so brave to survive,” Jack wrote. “I can’t believe that you have an alien identity. I live in a solid house, with a passport. I wouldn’t survive in your condition.”

Sammah responded with a picture of her coffee grinder and explained, “We’re Ethiopian, we like coffee.” Alongside a picture of her house, she wrote, “This is what the houses here look like.” Her letter closed with an echo of Jack’s sentiments. “I will not give up” sits wedged between a drawing of a tree and her thatched roof house. Amid the vivid imagery and enthusiastic descriptions of the material objects that comprise her daily life, these words feel like an afterthought.

Through personal contact, a different, richer story emerges between young people. A story grounded in context wherein school work, friendship, and family life emerge with deeper significance against the backdrop of a starker reality of which Jack was already, perhaps vaguely, aware. Through these kinds of exchanges, young writers and artists, like Jack and Sammah, become people to each other.

Another project, the “Half-Baked Art Exchange,” a joint initiative of the Stone Soup Refugee Project and U.K.-based My Start project, allowed South Sudanese boys living in Kakuma Refugee Camp to create a piece of artwork in collaboration with young members of the broader Stone Soup community based in the U.S. and the U.K.

We began with a workshop where Kakuma Camp participants created an original piece of artwork, reflective of their lives, with a My Start project facilitator. Meanwhile, Stone Soup participants attended a workshop to learn about life in Kakuma Camp and various aspects of their partners’ cultural practices and lived environments. Following this, Stone Soup participants received the works created in Kakuma Camp and added to them in ways that sought to highlight the original piece while creating a dialogue between two people and two worlds.

Akech, from Kakuma Camp, began “Silver Specks” by layering found objects, colored packing paper, and thick glue baked in the desert sun to depict a line of yellow, green, and red squares with scattered flecks of silver against a brown background. His U.S.-based partner, Georgia, interpreted the colored squares in “Silver Specks” as a road, and added shadowed silhouettes, and little bits of sticks tied with wire to represent a fence. “I wanted to show joy, bright and bold,” she said, “but still trapped in the brown land, caught by the sharp threads of a barbed wire fence.”

For participants like Georgia, the workshop offered an opportunity to humanize and gain a deeper understanding of the experiences of young people displaced by war, social collapse, and climate crisis. As part of their workshop about life in Kakuma Camp, Georgia and her fellow Stone Soup participants had viewed a video showcasing the lives of Akech and other Sudanese artists. “Most people imagine [a refugee camp] to be a toxic wasteland full of sadness and hunger and a weary thirst for escape,” Georgia explained. But the video “showed people dancing, laughing, hugging, and going about their daily lives.”

For the young refugee participants, this workshop, and other Stone Soup initiatives, offer a platform to tell their own stories, in their own voices, for an audience of their peers. Lobola, a Sudanese boy, said his piece, “Full Pink Sun Half a Yellow Sun,” depicted how being in the camp “is like being in another world [apart] from the rest of the world and the sun is in the middle because it is so so hot here.” His collaborative U.S.-based partner, Anika, added a piece of paper with the word “Home”—because it is not just a place of abstract suffering, but a home, and for many, including Lobola, the only one he’s ever known.

This storytelling has powerful effects. Parwana Amiri, the 16-year-old writer of “Fly With Me,” says that for her, “writing is immortality.” By immortalizing a young person’s experience of war and trauma, and providing a deeper connection and context for their art, we move beyond the simplistic initial response of empathy that war narratives provoke. And in forging deeper solidarities, our own sense of agency comes into being—a sense of agency from which we might disrupt hollow deflections of suffering in favor of imagining alternative possibilities.

The post When Kids Make Art, a Richer Story of War Emerges appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It took until the cusp of middle age—the ripe age of 39—for me to write what would become my first book.

The spark for this new stage of my life was grief. My wife and I were lucky to have a healthy 8-year-old boy, but the pregnancy had been difficult. Little did we know that the experience would portend years of trying to have another child—and eventually, seven miscarriages.

I was content to stop after the first miscarriage, but my wife deeply desired another baby, so who was I to argue? But by the fifth miscarriage, as I tried to help my wife and young son through their grief, I was struggling with my own. In search of comfort and healing, I started to write.

The subject matter that I chose to explore was my paternal grandparents’ migration from Mexico to Los Angeles in the 1920s. I wanted to construct, from both family history and my own imagination, their lives in this city. I wanted to imagine and write about the struggles and triumphs of people who left their homeland to begin anew—perhaps as a guide, of sorts, to help me navigate my grief, or even as a simple reassurance that we all suffer through difficult times but we can work through them and not only survive but thrive.

Something deep inside me whispered that this creative exercise might offer catharsis, a release from the grief I was enduring. And it did. The Courtship of María Rivera Peña, my first novella, gave me new space to explore the joy and pains that life presents. I am not trained in psychology, but I suspect there is a term for what I experienced. There were moments during the writing process when tears ran down my face in a way that was almost cleansing. Seeing the fictionalized lives of my grandparents take form on the page of my novella seemed to clarify the well of hurt I felt, making it more bearable.

The Courtship of María Rivera Peña has been on my mind because I’ve been looking into getting it back in print for its 25th anniversary. Returning to the text now—it’s been at least a decade since I’ve read it last—I’ve been struck by how present Los Angeles is in the tale, the location giving the story meaning, contours, and vibrancy. Set amid the dramatic growth and development of the late 1920s to the early 1950s L.A., the city offers Humberto Isla Velasco (known by his nickname of “Beto”), María, and their community places to worship, ways to earn a living, and spaces to commune over meals and be entertained. All of this fed their souls, bodies, and minds in ways that enriched their daily existence even amid struggles that immigrants in this country so often face, from bigotry to economic inequality.

That Los Angeles has deeply informed my fiction from the start makes sense because L.A. is so deeply embedded in my DNA, if a metropolis can imprint itself on our essence. My people have been here for a century, and the major milestones of my life are spread throughout Los Angeles, like so many marbles on a schoolyard.

I was born at the now-shuttered Temple Community Hospital on North Hoover Avenue, a year after the Dodgers left Brooklyn and played their first game in Los Angeles. I spent the first few years of my life three miles from that hospital in a little blue house on Dewey Avenue that was torn down to make way for a parking lot that serves Loyola High School where I would eventually enroll years later. And a few months before JFK’s assassination, we moved a half mile west to a gray wood-framed house on Ardmore Avenue that I called home until I married and moved to the San Fernando Valley to start a family. When our son eventually graduated from UCLA and moved out, one of his first apartments was in Koreatown not far from the blue-green, terra-cotta-tiled Wiltern Theatre on Wilshire Boulevard, where I enjoyed double features as a child. And as empty nesters, my wife and I migrated out of the Valley toward downtown Los Angeles, eventually settling in Pasadena.

All of these pieces of Los Angeles have made their way into my work, the landmarks and history natural allies in my attempts to depict my hometown’s profound Mexican roots and to center a people and culture that so often have been erased—or worse yet, stereotyped—in works that critics have dubbed “essential” Los Angeles literature but have largely ignored my community. My writing is a natural reflection of the L.A. I know, a place that’s deeply segregated, with an ugly history of police brutality, exclusion, and systematic alienation, but also one where many have thrived and built remarkable lives against seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

My relationship with Los Angeles continues to grow stronger and more complex as the years go by. A few months ago, I visited my mother at the small house in Ventura she and my late father purchased in the mid-1980s. We chatted about her parents’ courtship as well as her courtship with my father. Many of the family stories that she shared I had known for years—but she also told me something that reminded me how tied I really am, physically and spiritually, to this place.

At one point, we talked about the moments when my grandfather and father realized they were ready to marry. For my grandfather, the light bulb went off in 1925 at the Alexandria Hotel on 501 South Spring Street, where he was reunited with my grandmother (who had been his girlfriend in Mexico) at a party. In what I imagine was a magical evening, my grandfather swore off the single life and proposed marriage. For my parents, something similar happened in 1952, just down the street, at the Title Insurance and Trust Building at 433 South Spring Street. My mother worked as a secretary there and used to take lunchtime calls from my father at the public payphone outside. It was during one of those phone calls that he proposed. (Apparently, he had wanted to propose a few days earlier while on a date with my mother, but he felt thwarted by the presence of my aunt who was appointed chaperone by my grandfather.) That same street in downtown plays a starring role in my own life, too, because just steps away from the proposal, I’ve practiced law for the last 31 years in the Reagan State Building at 300 South Spring Street.

Three generations of my family, then, have lived, worked, and loved—for almost 100 years—on this relatively small patch of Spring Street. In a metropolis this size, what are the odds? I pointed out the connection to my mother, and she looked at me for a moment in silence. Then, a smile slowly formed on her beautiful face, and she laughed.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “But you’re right. Without that street, there wouldn’t be any of us!”

It made me realize that Los Angeles will always be a constant character in my fiction. Because it has, quite literally, made me.

The post Los Angeles Will Always Be a Character in My Story appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I recently learned that the world-making activity Jesús and I shared is known as paracosm. According to a study cited by the Wall Street Journal, about 17 percent of children tend to develop a detailed personal universe that they outgrow later in life, not unlike an imaginary friend. Nonetheless, while a make-believe friend might be a companion, the imaginary world is more about the joy of discovery and curiosity, from conjuring a forest in your mind and wondering what creatures are lurking over the next hill to dreaming up a city far more exciting than the one you live in and wondering who lives there, what drives their lives, if they love someone, or if they are happy. Before you know it, you’re doodling wondrous beasts and crude maps, trying to make sense of the world inside your head.

Interestingly enough, the kids who developed a paracosm didn’t score any better than their peers in terms of intelligence, vocabulary, memory, or creativity. The only reported major difference from other children was that those who created paracosms showed having more problems at filtering out irrelevant thoughts.

Some famous writers who have mentioned making paracosms in their youth are Stanislaw Lem, Oxford don C.S. Lewis—with the help of his brother Warren—and Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë (with the help of their brother Branwell). Some of these unreal realms, unsurprisingly, were influenced by the children’s perspectives on the adult world that surrounded them. In a 1984 essay, Lem points out the irony of how he amused himself as a child in interwar Poland by creating fictitious passports, permits, and government memos only to have his family survive the Nazi takeover with the aid of forged documents. He wonders if these games were a reflection of “some unconscious sense of danger.”

The imaginary worlds of the two sets of siblings, meanwhile, mirrors the British culture, politics, attitudes, and imperialism of the time: The Brontës’ world of Glass Town was set in an imaginary West Africa (later moved to the Pacific Ocean) with characters based on British explorers, Napoleon, and the Duke of Wellington. The sisters’ earliest writings are the extensive correspondence and poems of the inhabitants of Glass Town. The Lewis’s world, Boxen, was born out of Warren’s tales about India and his more famous brother’s love of stories involving talking animals, such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

My own paracosm started when I was a weird, curious, and somewhat lonely tween growing up in Maracay, a mid-sized city in Venezuela, in the early 2000s. My source of fascination was not India or Africa, but the United States. Or at least a distorted version filled with everything I found mesmerizing about a place I only knew through media. The setting was not some hypothetical ancient era or an idealized version of the Middle Ages, but vaguely reminiscent of the mid to late 20th century—the height of the American empire, so to speak. I named this nation Urbania.

In Urbania, there’s an equivalent city to New York and places analogous to New Orleans, California, and Texas. There are enormous cities filled with skyscrapers and subways, endless suburbs and prisons with electric chairs. There are wealthy industrialist families bound through fraternities and clubs, immigrants on crowded ocean liners looking to start a new life, and reactionary militias boiling on the fringe. There’s a colorful past that carries the sins of colonialism and endless foreign wars, which ultimately seal the country’s fate.

Characters and places, although imaginary, had names taken from all sorts of sources: Bertolt Brecht plays, classic black and white movies, Saturday Night Live cast members. When you were a middle-class tween in Venezuela in the early 2000s, you either studied a musical instrument, played sports or learned English. I did the latter and, as soon as I could, I began working on my imaginary universe in the language I’m writing these words because it felt “right.”

The adults around me, though supportive, were irked that I didn’t try to write about something closer to my own culture and reality. On one hand, I was a child of globalization. Like many millennials around the globe, I had prefabricated childhood ideas from watching The Simpsons and playing Pokémon. The very first book I read in its entirety was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. When I was 7, I knew who Bill Clinton was but not the president of my own country.

On the other hand, I had a hard time connecting with other kids, didn’t have the best family situation, and tried to distance myself from a world that felt overwhelming. For me, Urbania offered an escape. It started out as a way to channel my creative impulses. I have always liked to tell stories. Urbania started out as a comic book, then a movie script and finally a book series with no clear beginning or end that has been started, abandoned, or lost dozens of times over 20 years. Despite working so many years on Urbania, I’ve never been able to even finish a short story set there.

However, I can’t say all those years I spent developing a universe in my head has been a waste of time. My protagonists were exploring their sexual orientation and gender performance way before I admitted to myself that I was attracted to men. Trying to flesh out my little realm of the unreal made me research history, geography, world cultures, mythology, religion, politics and linguistics, essentially turning it into a shorthand to try to understand the real world.

In my case, I started to write thanks to my paracosm, which is what eventually led me to become a journalist and to getting short stories published every now and then. There was a time when I was worried that I might pass on, like Jesús did, and felt concerned that the little scraps—the first chapters of novels that never had a follow-up, drawings of maps and flags in yellowish notebooks at my mother’s apartment—might end up as puzzle pieces for an image that was never fully completed. But now, if I never manage to publish a single word about the small world located in the back of my head I wouldn’t be upset.

Jesús, too, used his paracosm to relate to the world. He wasn’t a writer, he was a political scientist, but his life was defined by working hard and passionately on little things, always hoping something bigger and better was coming, and having an infinite love for humanity and what it has been able to achieve. That was one of the many things that made me relate to him. The make-believe country that was his own personal realm of the unreal was also an intellectual game where he could design and apply social and political ideas that appealed to him. The blue, white, and green flag he was buried with not only served as the symbol of his personal utopia, but also the banner that a better world was possible.

Talking with some friends and colleagues about my making worlds as a hobby, I realize it’s a far more common activity than I suspected for individuals with a natural passion, admiration, and curiosity about why people do what they do. Many of them aren’t writers like the Brontë sisters or Lewis. They are journalists, economists, historians, and many of them still continue to dream on. People might claim this activity is for a novel they are writing or for a tabletop game they play, but in all those cases I see the sign of the fellow traveler who enjoys more the endless journey to find out what’s over the next hill than hurrying to the purported destination.

I can’t help but think about the study cited by the Wall Street Journal and wonder: Maybe all those so-called irrelevant details that as children we were meant to filter out, really have helped us to gain a different, broader insight about the society we live in. Looking back, all that I have achieved, at least career-wise, has been indirectly derived from chronicling the rise and fall of Urbania, an imagined land that has given me so much in real life.

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Civil War soldiers and their families had abundant causes for worry. The men were exposed to rampant disease as well as the perils of the battlefield. Women, running households without help, often faced overwork and hunger. Letters bore the burdens not just of keeping in touch and expressing affection but also of assuaging fear about loved ones’ well-being. Yet most ordinary American families, never having endured a long separation until now, had little experience writing letters to each other. Sometimes barely literate—Sarepta had to ask her older brother to put down on paper what she wanted to say to Daniel—Americans quickly had to learn the delicate art of recreating the comforts of physical presence using only the written word.

Much of the time, they did so by writing about their bodies. In hundreds of millions of letters sent between battlefield and home front, moving across the nation by horse and by rail in recent innovations called envelopes, ordinary Americans reported the details of how they looked, what they ate, how much they weighed. Their world had been one of doing and touching rather than reading and writing, but now, by their ingenuity and resolve to hold their families together, they reshaped the culture of letter writing.

Letter to Mrs. Nancy McCoy from her son, Private Isaac McCoy of Co. A, 9th Pennsylvania Cavalry Regiment, postmarked Feb. 2, 1863. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

Letters were close cousins to newspapers: Only a few centuries before, in early modern England, had private letters and commercial news reporting gone separate ways (though the habit of calling journalists “correspondents” remains)—and early Americans still considered a good letter one that could “tell all the news.” Yet news was something soldiers sorely lacked. Isolated from the world beyond their regiments, awaiting orders they rarely understood, men could not satisfy their families’ yearnings for news of the war. “You can see more in the papers,” a typical soldier wrote home. Modern historians have sometimes been frustrated to find rich archives of Civil War letters that seem curiously silent on political and military affairs, but these were subjects ordinary Americans thought newspapers were covering perfectly well. What was left to them was reporting the news of their own physical selves. It may have felt a little odd at first—had Sarepta Revis gone around the house comparing herself to livestock?—but it was what families wanted, and writers found ways to oblige.

Reporting a healthy weight was one of the readiest ways to assure a distant reader you weren’t sick or malnourished. A wife as fat as a pig certainly wasn’t starving, a husband like Daniel Revis could be relieved to know, which was more important in wartime than anyone’s notions of beauty. Soldiers enjoyed the small luxury of reporting healthy weights to the folks back home in exact numbers, because they had access to scales. When regiments were encamped and relatively idle, medical staff could hold regular “sick calls,” examinations that included being weighed.

The resulting numbers made their way into hundreds, probably thousands, of letters from soldiers. Loyal Wort, a 31-year-old Ohioan in the Union Army, wrote to his wife, Susan, “i was waid the other day and waid one hundred and seventy one pounds So you See i am pretty fat.” Thomas Warrick of Alabama assured his wife, Martha, “My helth is good at this time” and, as evidence, reported, “I waide one hundred and seventy-fore pounds the last time I waide and that was the other day.” A Georgia private named Andrew White enthusiastically declared, “I way more now than I ever did in my lief I way 197 pounds.” He believed that if only he hadn’t spent an entire night out in the rain on picket duty, “I would have reached 200 pound in a Short time.” In a war that would see men’s bodies torn apart by shells and reduced almost to nothing by privation—one Union soldier lucky enough to survive the notorious Andersonville prison weighed 80 pounds at his release—numeric snapshots of the physical self acted like needles on the gauges of anxiety.

Letter to Miss Lydia H. Weymouth of North Braintree, Massachusetts, sent during the Civil War. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

Pictorial snapshots had appeal, too, of course, and the relatively new technology of photography became tremendously popular among military families for similar reasons. Virtually all soldiers and soldiers’ wives who had the money and the opportunity got their portraits taken and exchanged them in the mail. An Iowa coupled joked that their photographs of each other were getting “all rubbed out” by too-frequent kissing. But photographs captured only a moment in the past. The back-and-forth of letters could document change.

For younger soldiers, especially, going to war meant proving themselves to be men and not boys, and they strove to picture themselves that way for their families. William Allen Clark wrote to his worried parents in Indiana, “If you was to see me, your doubts in regard to my health would certainly be dispelled. You wouldent see the same Slim, stoop shouldered, awkward, Gosling.” He weighed 12 pounds more than he had the previous summer. William Martin of South Carolina told his sister, “I am Now Larger than My Father My weight is Now 175 pounds.” He also wanted her to know “my whiskers is getin prity thick and they are two inches Long.” A young Georgian named James Mobley was engaged in a kind of competition with his friends: “I wayed 170 pounds and I now weigh 175 and if I keep on I will weigh 180 before long . . . Father wrote to me that John Reece said I weighted 170 and he said he weighed 177 he is only 2 pd larger than I am and I will get them on him if I dont get sick.”

When times were good—when fighting slowed, medical staff had time to make the rounds, and winter’s hardships had not set in—reports of good health prevailed, like the boasts of Wort, Warrick, and White. But the news was not always as good. If some men and women tried to spare their loved ones by withholding worrisome information, many did not. Ebenezer Coggin wrote home from a Richmond hospital that his weight had bottomed out at 105 pounds, although he insisted he was on the mend. Daniel Revis replied to Sarepta that, for his part, he was “as pore as a snake, we dont get anuf to eat.” (In 19th-century vernacular, the opposite of “fat,” “stout,” or “hearty” was “poor.”) It wasn’t what Sarepta wanted to hear, but one didn’t need a formal education to insist on honesty. “Dont tell me you feel better when you dont,” Betsy Blaisdell admonished her husband in December of 1864. She had received no letter from him in the previous day’s mail and worried it meant his recent illness had worsened. Forlorn in the cold of upstate New York—“I never dreaded winter before” Hiram left for war, she wrote—Betsy told him, nothing could “fill your place.” When Hiram’s letter of reassurance finally arrived, it featured his best effort at recreating his physical self: “I have just washed up all clean and nice,” he reported. “I guess if I was there I would have a kiss and it would not mess up your face much.”

Envelope featuring the Confederate flag, addressed to Miss Lou Taylor of Cincinnati, Ohio. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, the U.S. Post Office Department had been delivering about five letters per capita annually. During the war, the average soldier sent more than five times that many. People who felt little capable of long, expressive narratives about their mental and physical well-being proved all the more resourceful in approximating bodily presence. For Americans during the Civil War, embracing loved ones on paper was a hardship they could only with difficulty overcome. Most of them, no doubt, would have rather not had to resort to it. For us, their efforts created a record of something we rarely get to see: glimmers of the emotional lives of ordinary people long gone.

Martha Poteet of western North Carolina endured labor and delivery, for at least the ninth time, during her husband’s absence in 1864. When she wrote to Francis a month later, she cheerfully described the easiest postpartum recovery she ever had experienced. “I had the best time I ever had and I hav bin the stoutest ever sens I haint lay in bed in day time in two Weeks today.” Of the baby, a girl she was waiting to name until Francis came home, Martha could report no weight—scales and doctors were rare things in the Blue Ridge.

She had a better idea. She laid the baby’s hand on scrap of paper, traced a line around it, and carefully cut it out to tuck into the envelope. Some days later, in a long-besieged trench outside Petersburg, Virginia, Francis Poteet opened that envelope and held his new daughter’s hand in his.

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Last summer, an exhibit at the Guggenheim—“The End of Signature” by Polish artist Agnieszka Kurant—used a mechanical autopen to produce identical signatures every 30 seconds. The artwork was inspired by the “decline of handwriting and the dominance of keystrokes and digital communication” and, indeed, there’s no doubt that all our lives involve much more typing and much less long-hand writing than they once would have. But as for the end of the signature—well, we still seem to be an awfully long way from that.

I sign my name constantly: when I make credit card purchases, when I write checks, when I agree to contracts or leases, when I file my taxes, when I check in to hotels, when I receive packages. Admittedly, some of these signatures involve trying to use my index finger or an unwieldy plastic stylus to produce a signature on a screen, rather than the traditional pen and paper—but the fundamental process of producing my name by hand, in writing, is essentially the same.

You have probably, at some point in the not too distant past, found yourself scrambling to find a printer and scanner to return some important paperwork—and you have probably found yourself crying out to the computer gods, “Isn’t there a better way?” And yet the tyranny of the physical signature endures, long after we’ve stopped having to go into banks for every transaction or pay our bills by mail. Technology has given us so much and yet, in this seemingly very simple domain, it seems to have made life harder rather than easier, turning the straightforward process of writing down your name into a three-step, multiple-technology ordeal of printing, signing, and scanning (to say nothing of shredding, if you’re dealing with a sensitive form or contract).

“About 20 years ago, people thought digital signatures would replace the physical signature,” Ronald Mann, a law professor at Columbia University, told me. “Technologically, digital signatures are really interesting, but it’s been very difficult to make that transition.” The challenges of moving away from physical signatures arise largely from social conventions, and our inability to understand exactly what digital signatures are, and what it means to affix one to a document or file.

Very few transactions actually require physical, handwritten signatures anymore besides the sale of land and real estate, Mann said. If you don’t sign a credit card slip for a purchase, for instance, it doesn’t mean you haven’t agreed to pay—you’ve already made that agreement just by handing over your card. So you’re usually just wasting your time if you sign your name to buy groceries or houseplants (or any of the few things left in life you don’t buy online, where you never have to provide a signature anyway).

Admittedly, it takes just seconds to sign your name (though the process of printing, signing, and scanning forms can take quite a bit longer than that) so the loss of time isn’t a huge concern. Perhaps more worrying than that, though, is that all these signatures leave us with the misguided sense that signing your name is somehow meaningful, that it represents an agreement, an acceptance, an authorization when, in fact, most of the time that final, physical step is entirely unnecessary and, indeed, irrelevant.

“The signature used to be important, but it just doesn’t play much of a role any more. It remains commonplace because of tradition,” Mann said of signatures authorizing purchases. “It’s always been the way that people have formally signaled their willingness to create a binding obligation, and we don’t really have an effective alternative or replacement.”

The clear candidate for replacement would seem to be the digital signature, but the name is slightly misleading in suggesting how easy that transition should be. Digital signatures are not just the strict equivalent of physical signatures for the computing age—not the italicized cursive fonts that your name is rendered in when you sign some online contracts, for instance (a strange artifact of trying to make sense of signatures, especially since my own handwriting has never resembled Lucida Handwriting).

A digital signature involves encrypting data in a way that could have been done only by you or someone holding your private encryption key. If you receive, say, an email message with the sender’s verified digital signature, then you know it must have been sent by that person (or by someone who has stolen their encryption key). That signature is specific to the message it accompanies and cannot be easily copied or attached to another message. This makes it much harder to effectively forge emails from people who digitally sign their emails, not that there are many of them.

The foretold transition to relying on digital signatures was plagued by the challenges of trying to define what, exactly, constituted a signature and when people recognized what they were doing as a form of signing. “It’s easier to tell whether what someone did was intended to be a signature when you’re dealing with physical signatures,” Mann said of digital signatures. “When we say a document is binding on somebody if they sign it, we all recognize what that means. If you say it’s valid if someone signs it digitally, then no one knows what that means.”

This confusion about what digital signatures mean seems like something we should be able to work out. And if we could just get over that hump, the rewards could be considerable; not only do they eliminate all the misery of printing and scanning, but digital signatures are vastly superior to physical ones. The fact that you need to steal someone’s private encryption key to forge a digital signature also gives digital signatures a leg up on their physical counterparts, since just about anyone can sign my name relatively convincingly, especially if they’ve seen my signature before. In fact, the physical signature seems to be an increasingly worthless tool for authenticating people’s identities, as we do more and more signing with fingers and screens and end up with a result bearing little resemblance to our pen-and-paper signatures.

There are some possible replacements on the horizon, at least when it comes to authorizing credit card purchases. Chip-and-PIN technologies that ask people to input a numerical personal identification number instead of a signature to complete a purchase have been slow to reach the United States but are already in use in much of Europe and Australia. (Entering a PIN is not a digital signature as we typically think of them, but using PINs to authenticate has a little bit in common with digital signatures since it is, essentially, another means of using a secret number that only you know to prove your identity.)

Digital signatures have been hugely important for securing the web, and many of the sites you visit (I hope!) are cryptographically “signed” to verify that they actually are the site they claim to be. But when it comes to issuing and using personal digital signatures for individuals, rather than websites, things have moved much more slowly. That’s partly because the process of setting up a digital signature can be somewhat unwieldy and onerous—if you want to apply digital signatures to your emails, for instance, you’ll have to look up the appropriate steps that correspond to your email program, and you may soon find yourself yearning for the days of printing and scanning.

It’s easy to muddle talk of digital signatures with physical signatures and lose sight of the fact that they are, in many ways, profoundly different things and not every physical signature warrants a digital replacement. For a lot of the more vestigial, legally meaningless physical signatures that linger on in modern life, substituting a digital signature is probably unnecessary—we could just resort to typing our names (in one of those handwriting fonts, if you insist) or doing away with them altogether.

Signatures have long since lost much of their symbolic value as a means of proving someone’s identity or a lasting memento of an encounter with a celebrity (or, as Paris Hilton put it during a guest appearance on the television show The O.C., which I definitely don’t remember at all from high school, “Camera phones are the autograph of the 21st century”—the twin mentions of Paris Hilton and “camera phones” making that possibly the most dated reference possible to the technological innovation of the 21st century). We care very little about other people’s signatures these days, and perhaps even less about our own, scribbling it mindlessly day after day even though it confers no real authority to approve purchases or agreements, even though no one cares what it looks like or whether it matches the signature on the back of your credit card or whether it’s really you.

In that regard, the end of the signature actually happened a while ago—and we’re all just in denial.

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The exhibition documents the amazing achievements of students and teachers at a tiny experimental school called Black Mountain College, improbably functioning from 1933 to 1957 in the mountains of western North Carolina. Day by day, over years, innovators as diverse as Bauhaus-trained painter Josef Albers and American poet Robert Creeley found space there to explore possibilities of their own work and to collaborate in providing an education with art at the very center.

Today, names like John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jacob Lawrence, Willem de Kooning, Anni Albers, Charles Olson, and Buckminster Fuller are touchstones in the worlds of music, dance, art, crafts, poetry, design.

Hazel Larsen Archer, Merce Cunningham Dancing, c. 1952-53.

 
In 1955, the summer I was 18, most of Black Mountain’s “names” were barely known, let alone celebrated—and while I did have fun, I encountered something far more serious.

1955 was the dark ages. Especially in the South. Chapel Hill, where I lived, had just one bookstore, one record store. No black people went to the university. Carrboro, right next door, wasn’t known for roots music. It was a hardcore Southern mill town, rigidly segregated as everything was. At the mill, black men got janitor and loading jobs only.

Hypocritical standards for female behavior loomed everywhere. Being liked by boys was the highest achievement open to young Southern white women. Thus I was inured to a “boys won’t like you if …” refrain. If you don’t wear lots of lipstick. If you talk too loud. If you argue. If you get known as “easy.” If you don’t.

Education had a clear, stay-in-line structure, including the unspoken instruction for women: Be sure to catch a husband by graduation time. Women could not even attend the university at Chapel Hill until their junior year, and the flood of co-eds entering from the women’s branch in Greensboro seemed singularly devoted to husband-seeking. I found a few exceptions in university art classes, which I was able to take while I was still in high school, because my father was on the university staff. (He was director of the University of North Carolina Press.)

Small wonder I was sulky, resentful, and, despite a few small adventures, very, very lonely.

Then one June day I was on a Trailways Bus bound for the summer session at an obscure place called Black Mountain College. I’d learned of it through The Black Mountain Review magazine in the university library. But I’d been given wildly diverse descriptions from everyone I asked. “Is it still open?” “Full of communists and Negro lovers!” “It might be interesting for you. Is Eric Bentley (a New York theatre critic) still there?” (He had been, in the early 1940s. Not any more.)

I wasn’t sure the place I was headed to was even real. But I’d been informed the school dining hall was closed, so stuffed in my duffle bag was a one-burner hot plate and a small iron frying pan liberated from my mother’s kitchen.

Two students in a rust-bucket car were at the bus stop to pick me up. The red-haired one just drove. The other, in a flat Boston accent, talked on and on. There’s a big party tonight to kick off the summer. You have to come. You’ll meet everyone. You’ll be shocked at how big Charles Olson is. Six foot seven. And he rattled on about an amazing work called The Maximus Poems that Charles Olson was in the midst of writing. I’d seen Olson’s name in The Black Mountain Review, where his writing and that of others had shocked and intrigued me.

He said I could choose my classes when I talked to Charles, who was head of the school, and Wes Huss, the theater teacher and school treasurer. Nothing was assigned, he assured me. Nothing was required. I could ask for tutorials. I could come and go as I wanted. All the studio art classes were taught by a painter, Joe Fiore. Other painters from New York were sure to visit later to review graduation shows. That was how it worked. If, and he said it was an “if,” one worked for graduation. Lots of people didn’t. A person could simply work. Like real life.

Joseph Fiore, Black Mountain, Lake Eden, 1954.

 
He laughed.

I was reeling after the five-mile drive. We stopped at a gravel turnaround at the entrance to a fabulously austere, long, white building, resting like a ship by the side of a small lake. The Studies Building. “Students built it,” my impromptu guide reported breathlessly, dragging my duffle into the small entryway.

“Your education belongs to you,” Charles Olson began. He was in his office along with Wes but sunk into a butt-sprung easy chair, the springs of which may have been on the floor. I had no sense of his size.

“You are responsible for what you want to do here,” he told me.

The more I thought about that, later that day and beyond, the more dazzling and more frightening it became. What did I want? I had come for the summer just to get away from home. Suddenly there was more to it. Where did I want to be? And why? No one had ever asked me. Unlike most of the people I’d meet that summer, I had never asked myself. But they had. It was a startling difference even from the arty UNC students I knew.

Anni Albers, Knot 2, 1947 (photographed by Tim Nighswander/Imaging 4 Art).

 
By 1955, almost everything material at the school was broken, run down, disintegrating. The single washing machine on campus was marked “fuckt.” Lorraine and Mona, down the hall from my room in a large cottage named Streamside, showed me a “stomp in the bathtub” washing method that was kind of fun and passably effective. Clothing didn’t require a lot of laundry skills. Students wore Mexican shirts, torn jeans, handmade earrings. A foretaste of hippie fashion. Many wore the sandals that one of the art students made, strips of rubber crossing over the top of the foot securing sections of tire tread for soles.

How could a whole world open up for me in such a derelict place?

But it did. Everywhere I was confronted by radical departures from the self-assured liberal world I’d grown up in. In Charles Olson’s reading list. In music theory with Stefan Wolpe and theater with Wes Huss—we did scenes by Lorca and Beckett. In Josef Albers’ color theories, conveyed by a former Albers student, Tony Landreau. Most of all, in constant exchanges among teachers and students—about how nothing is ever truly nothing in art, or poetry, or theater; about giving oneself permission to try anything; about detecting and avoiding the predetermined.

Josef Albers, Tenayuca, 1943 (photographed by Ben Blackwell).

 
I was at BMC only three months. But a practice of “cut to the chase, go for what you really mean, use any means you can enlist to do that”—what my fellow students called “the Black Mountain brainwash”—left me unable to adapt to the rules of conventional education. I remember thinking I’d be involved with Black Mountain ideas for the rest of my life. I wasn’t mistaken.

The exhibition at the Hammer Museum focuses on the college’s formal dates of operation. But, in my experience, the daring that animated BMC continues to leap. There are still some surprises from its last generation awaiting a wider public look. Poets John Wieners and Edward Dorn. Painters Tom Field and Basil King.

Only last year, artists from the indie rock groups Arcade Fire and The National collaborated on a multimedia “Black Mountain Songs” in Brooklyn and London, incorporating poetry, painting, dance, theater, and music animated by Black Mountain’s examples.

What galvanized that small group of misfits and mischief-makers, what required people who stayed at Black Mountain to be alive to the unexpected—this has a life beyond the dates that bracket the College’s existence.

“Onward,” as poet Robert Creeley—a teacher at Black Mountain—put it.

A photograph of the Studies Building at Black Mountain College on a 2014 tour.

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In the political history collections at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, we hold three important links to these men and the ideals that inspired them: the portable writing boxes of Jefferson, Washington, and Hamilton. When staff at the Smithsonian recently took the boxes out to be photographed together for the first time, I was lucky enough to witness this moment. We were standing in the presence of the brilliant minds that shaped our country. Some of us stood in silent admiration. A few even got teary-eyed. America is a nation of ideas, and here were the instruments that first made those ideas a reality and transmitted them to the wider world.

The 18th-century writing box, also known as a dispatch case, portable desk, and writing case, would have been an important object for the traveling Founding Father to own. Like the laptops and mobile devices of today, a writing box provided its owner a base from which to communicate, even when on the move. A box generally contained space for paper, pens, ink, and pencils, and often unfolded to reveal some type of writing surface as well. For Jefferson, Washington, and Hamilton, who were often required to work away from the fully stocked desks they would have had in their homes and who were constantly writing letters or essays, the ability to travel with a small box with the most essential items from a writing desk was crucial. Each of their boxes, however, while serving similar purposes, is different.

Like the laptops and mobile devices of today, these 18th-century writing boxes—belonging, from left to right, to Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton—were portable bases from which to communicate.

Jefferson’s writing box is small and light, made of a beautiful mahogany with satinwood inlay. The top is a hinged board that can be propped up as a bookstand, or unfolded to twice its size to become a writing surface. A small drawer provides storage for paper, pens, and ink. It is emblematic of his many interests and talents. Jefferson spent over 40 years designing and redesigning his home in Virginia, Monticello, invented a new type of moldboard for a plow, and crafted his own designs for a sundial, a wheel cipher, a polygraph, and more, so it comes as no surprise that his desk was done after his own drawing. Jefferson had the desk constructed by Philadelphia cabinetmaker Benjamin Randolph sometime in either 1775 or 1776.

It was on this desk while away from home as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress that he drafted one of the seminal documents of our nation: the Declaration of Independence. Over the next half-century as a diplomat, cabinet member, and president, Jefferson continued to write copious amounts, some of it undoubtedly on this very desk. In 1825, Jefferson sent the desk as a gift to his granddaughter and her husband, Ellen and Joseph Coolidge, with a note in his own hand affixed beneath the writing board attesting that the desk “is the identical one on which he wrote the Declaration of Independence.” In 1880, the United States government officially accepted an offer from the Coolidge family to donate the desk, and it was placed in care of the State Department until 1921, when it was transferred to the Smithsonian.

For seven long years after the Declaration was written, the Revolutionary War raged, and George Washington was fighting and writing at its forefront. Washington’s dispatch case is of a completely different design than Jefferson’s—more easily portable but without as much space to write on. It was intended for use by someone constantly traveling. It was intended, in short, for someone like the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. The case is a slight rectangular box made of mahogany and covered with black leather. A hinged lid at the bottom opens to reveal several compartments for writing implements while the top has a leather pocket for stationary and documents. It could easily be slipped into a saddle or travel bag and carried to its owner’s next location.

As Commander-in-Chief, Washington had to be in constant communication with army officials and the Congress, sending dispatches, issuing orders, and writing letters both political and personal. His most pivotal decisions of the war were not issued on the battlefield but from his pen using this very case. Like the Jefferson writing box, those to whom the case was passed down eventually recognized its significance to the country and it was presented to the government in 1845 by Dr. Richard Blackburn in care of the U.S. Patent Office. In 1883 it was officially transferred to the Smithsonian, the first of the three boxes to arrive.

For a man whose legacy exists most prominently in the volumes of writings he produced during his lifetime, the sturdy workhorse quality of Alexander Hamilton’s portable desk seems fitting. Throughout his lifetime, Hamilton kept up a continuous stream of correspondence, military papers, cabinet papers, Treasury records, and political commentary. Most famously he authored 51 of the 85 essays of The Federalist Papers in just eight months. Hamilton knew the power of the written word and strove to use it to its fullest. The thick mahogany travel desk that resides in our collection is just the type to stand up to such constant use. It unfolds in the center to provide a large, slanted writing surface and includes a side drawer and slots for writing instruments. Like that of his political rival, Jefferson, Hamilton’s writing box remained with his descendants until they presented it to the Smithsonian in 1916.

“Politics as well as Religion has its superstitions. These, gaining strength with time, may, one day, give imaginary value to this relic, for its association with the birth of the Great Charter of our Independence,” wrote Jefferson in the affidavit he attached to his writing box. Time has proven him right, not only about his own box, but about those of Washington and Hamilton as well. Together, these objects that began as ordinary boxes remind us that our nation was built on a foundation of inspiring words, a new social contract Americans continue to honor, and endeavor to fulfill.

With these desks history was written, and with these desks our nation took shape. It is fitting that they all found their way to our national museum in the nation’s capital, the city where ultimately Jefferson, Washington, and Hamilton came together during Washington’s tenure as president and worked, fought, compromised, and wrote in the struggle to establish a nation. This war of words that has been passed down over two hundred years—more than the muskets and cannons fired during the Revolution—ensured that our new country would not only succeed, but flourish.

The post The Laptops That Powered the American Revolution appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But he did not. Almost 50 years later, around 1795, he wrote the story of their love—as fresh and intense as when it happened. Throughout the 19th century, romantic pilgrims retraced his steps from Parma to Geneva, hoping to find Henriette’s engraved message.

“He” was the notorious Giacomo Casanova, and he recounted his youthful affair with Henriette in his monumental autobiography, penned in a remote chateau in Bohemia where he spent his last years as the librarian of a German noble. After a youth in Venice, and a life in Paris, London, Constantinople, Saint-Petersburg, and other cities that took him from riches to misery, from jail to conversations with royalty, and from one beautiful woman to another, this unique adventurer relived his experience through writing it. The resulting legend has never ceased to inspire romantics and playboys, writers, poets, and filmmakers.

Valentine’s Day 2016 is an auspicious moment to reconsider what we know about it. In 2010, the manuscript of Casanova’s “History of My Life” was acquired by the French National Library and became accessible to the public as part of Francophone cultural and historical heritage. Two new scholarly editions are presently appearing in France. A wider readership for the “Life” will rightly discover Casanova’s talent as the creator of his own myth: His fame owes as much to his skill as a writer as it does to his amorous abilities.

Casanova is generally figured as the ultimate seducer. But he was not like the mythical Don Juan, interested solely in increasing the list of his conquests. His reputation rests less on the number—impressive as it may be—of liaisons that he recounts than on their details: the encounter, the courtship, the gradual building of mutual attraction, her wit and her personality, his seductive storytelling blended with erotic innuendos, and finally the lovemaking that both enjoy with abandon.

His tactics could be amusing. During his stay in London, feeling lonely in a city where he hardly knew anyone and didn’t speak the language, he placed an ad in his window looking to sublet an inexpensive apartment in his house to a young lady—provided she spoke Italian, received no male visitors, and kept him company at the dinner table. The ad made London society chuckle and soon brought him Mistress Pauline, a young, beautiful Portuguese noblewoman who, like Henriette, had escaped her family and was awaiting a signal to return home. Casanova fell in love immediately and courted her till she willingly made love to him. He made sure, he asserts, that she enjoyed it as much as he did. Indeed, he believed that both sexes could and should equally delight in erotic pleasure—and even wrote a proto-feminist treatise on women’s physiology and education—which made him unusual for his time.

Thus, while Henriette might have been the most romantic of his loves, Casanova had many more—duchesses, theater actresses, nuns, farm girls and courtesans. But he gave himself earnestly to each. He courted, lavished presents, amused, and helped. He respected female intelligence and wanted talk and company as well as sex. Finally, carried on by what he calls “the demon” of his adventurous destiny, he left for the next one. Unless, as in the case of Henriette, she was the one to leave. Either way, he would remember her—and write about her, lovingly, long after. We know from published letters, as well as from his account, that several of his former lovers also remembered him warmly; he corresponded with several (including Henriette) after they parted.

Casanova’s story is one of a life lived large, with an omnivorous creative appetite. He enjoyed other things as much as lovemaking—preparing a delicate meal for a wayward nun, lavishly masking his carnival companions, gambling through the night even if he lost a fortune. Also exchanging impromptu verses with other poets, creating elaborate hoaxes to convince others of his powers as an alchemist, and shining in a noble salon through his wit. His autobiography gives us a unique representation of 18th century Europe as reflected in one consciousness—from its pleasures (gambling dens and casinos, the Venetian carnival, German spas, the Paris opera, London theaters), to its clothes and food, its means of transportation (gondolas, sleds, boats, and all varieties of carriages), and its exotic places (Corfu, Constantinople, Madrid, Rome). Casanova provides pointed comments on various customs or languages; he describes well-known inns and hotels of his times along with the small objects on which fortunes were spent (snuff boxes, watches, silk stockings and jackets, female bonnets). He sketches the constant financial struggles of adventurers like him along with central beliefs, ideas, and conflicts of the Enlightenment.

Thus, though Casanova is mostly known as an inveterate lover, the diversity of his passions and talents is mind-boggling. He was a financial whiz who helped Louis XV fill up the royal coffers through lottery, a con man who extracted a fortune from a rich marquise adept at alchemy, a mathematician who attempted the long sought (but impossible) “calculation of doubling cubes,” an accomplished poet who translated the “Iliad” into Italian verse, a skilled writer who in one night penned an entire comedy without the sound “r” for an attractive actress with a speech impediment. He was the only prisoner who ever escaped from the notorious Venetian prison “The Leads.” Of course, he made the account of his flight into a narrative so enthralling that it opened to him the most exclusive Parisian salons.

Yet Casanova’s autobiography shows us as well that his character was far from unblemished: He gambled, cheated, and endured financial straits, humiliation, and prison—not to mention the recurring maladies, like syphilis, brought on by his libertine lifestyle. He also systematically refused marriage—the “tomb of love.” His book is honest about his not-so-admirable traits. And if his memory embellished his amorous feats (which, unlike most of the other facts, could not be checked), Casanova also knew to stop his autobiography in good time: It ends before his decline into old age and poverty, preserving for eternity his youthful legend and remaining an enthralling reading for all lovers. He shows how a talent for romance can be part of a much grander passion for life and writing.

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