I have been thinking a lot recently about what lasts and what is lost. Maybe this is what comes from spending a couple of years working on a television show about climate change in an imagined late twenty-first century. A person can’t spend her days flooding buildings on set to simulate sea-level rise or writing dialogue about endangered species without certain truths sinking in. Maybe it’s living through yet another election season where the risks seem enormous, but the daily content is absurd. Or it could just be the weather. It’s 108 degrees as I write this and it hasn’t rained in months. “What would you grab in a fire?” is not a hypothetical question in September in Southern California.
There are eras where enormous amounts of new things are generated: buildings, ideas, art forms, religions. And then there are eras where the task is preservation, carefully tending to the work of the past so that it isn’t forgotten. For the first half of my life, I only saw the former. I could tell you the names of the writers, filmmakers, artists, and philosophers who had broken my brain apart and put it back together. How their works had reached me, though, was invisible to me. Why was there a copy of this or that book in the school library or used bookstore? I never thought about it.
As for my own material, I threw it away carelessly, letting other people hold onto important scraps of paper and photos. “You might want this someday,” my friend or my mother would say to me. Probably not, I’d think. When I graduated from college, there was some complicated way you could download all four years of email correspondence into a file and take it with you. Four years of chatting with crushes and apologizing to roommates and following up with professors, four years of schedules, chats, and running jokes. Without even fully reading the instructions, I let it all go, into the digital ether. Anything that really mattered, I’d remember, right?
But these days, years later, I keep thinking about the lady with the blue teeth—herself a preserver, herself preserved.
In 2019, in Dalheim, Germany, researchers published in the journal Science Advances that they had found “lazurite and phlogopite crystals, in the form of powder consistent in size and composition with lapis lazuli–derived ultramarine pigment…embedded within the dental calculus of a middle-aged woman buried in association with a 9th- to 14th-century church-monastery complex.” According to the scientists’ radiocarbon dating, this woman lived sometime around AD 997–1162, and she represents the earliest direct evidence of ultramarine pigment usage by a religious woman in Germany. Lapis lazuli (the ingredient in ultramarine) was used especially for painting the vibrant blue robes of the Virgin Mary. Mined from a single region in Afghanistan and then traded across Europe, the crystals were carried thousands of miles, then crushed and suspended in oil to become paint.
The existence of ultramarine flecks in this woman’s dental plaque suggests that she worked as a manuscript artist and got little flecks of the pigment in her mouth from sucking on her paintbrush to bring it to a fine point. “Moreover, because the monastery and the entirety of its contents were destroyed during a 14th-century fire, this finding of lapis lazuli potentially represents the sole surviving evidence of female scribal activity at the site.” Religious women, including Sister Blue Teeth, copied manuscripts, keeping ancient texts alive. I like to think of her working on a text, not necessarily even completing it, but working collaboratively with the dozen or so other women in her order on the words and illustrations. Her skeleton showed no evidence of hard labor, trauma, or infection, so her life was, by tenth-century standards, not so bad—although, given that she died when she was my age, it wasn’t so great either. If the manuscript she painted those thin blue lines in made it out of Dalheim, perhaps it still exists somewhere. Her work would be uncredited, but not in vain. If the manuscript stayed in Dalheim, though, it was destroyed in the fourteenth-century fire that destroyed the whole building—a fire set during war, an act of man, not God.
I think about this anonymous middle-aged woman and the other women whose teeth have yet to be discovered, or who simply worked with other, less enduring paint colors. I think about life in the Middle Ages, what it might have felt like to work on a project that you assumed would last beyond your lifetime. To live in a small community of people all dedicated to the same task. As Mary Wellesley points out in The Gilded Page, the survival of any of these texts is highly contingent: “Medieval manuscripts that have endured into the present day are survivors of war, fire, flood, and disdain.” The social position, wealth, and gender of the author also matters: “No medieval manuscript of Julian of Norwich’s Long Text of the Revelations of Divine Love—the earliest work in English written by a woman—survives. We are reliant on copies made by Benedictine nuns in the seventeenth century.” For every writer of original material, like Julian, there are thousands of other people who copied it in the hopes that it would survive. The creator is nothing without her transcribers.
After my mother died, I had help figuring out the practicalities of what to do with all her stuff, but, as an only child of a single mom, the decisions were ultimately mine. My husband could open boxes and ask, “What do you want to do with this?” but he couldn’t choose. My best friend gamely drove away with a side table (for her personal use) and a trunk full of towels (to donate to the local homeless shelter where she works), but it was up to me to decide how to handle, say, my baby teeth, or sentimental family jewelry that no one had worn in decades. What to do with medical paperwork (there was a lot!) and wedding china. It was a situation I had never been in before, but also one I had watched on countless reality-TV shows. I needed to de-clutter. Or did I?
The popularity of minimalists like Marie Kondo, urging us to discard that which does not spark joy, up to and including books and tax documents, has led to a backlash by people like Becca Rothfeld, who feel that a spare home, full of only that which we would need in case of emergency, is empty, hollow, because “it is only via accumulation…that we graduate from schema to soul.” Rothfeld combines her critique of de-cluttering with one of “the fragment novel,” the type of contemporary book composed of small chunks, often written by and about middle-aged mothers who are so overwhelmed, perhaps by clutter, that they can only manage to jot down their observations in fragments. These “impoverished non-novels” are as unfulfilling to her as an empty white-and-gray modern farmhouse. “I dream of a house stuffed floor to ceiling,” she writes,
rooms so overfull they prevent entry; too many books for the shelves; fictions brimming with facts but, more importantly, flush with form; for pages, clauses like jewels strung onto necklaces; a kitchen crammed with cream, melting butter, sweating cheese. Clothes on the floor, shoes on the bed, blood rusted on the sheets, mud loaming all the carpets, and a table set for a banquet bigger than I could ever host.
I thought of my mom when I read Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small, because she similarly lived in a state of abundance. My mom loved a party, an argument, an extra glass of wine, an additional cookie, “just one more thing”—whether an actual object or a way to avoid ending a phone call. Also, for perhaps less fun reasons than Rothfeld’s, her carpets and sheets were indeed sometimes stained with fluids toward the end of her life. I thought about the parties my mother hosted, for birthdays, retirements, weddings, just for the hell of it. I admired Rothfeld’s ability to make her sentences overflow like her imagined surroundings. And I thought, Becca, who will clean out your house when you die?
Things are lost in all kinds of ways. Thrown away, destroyed by earthquake or fire or flood. There are a handful of items we lost in a recent move, incomprehensibly. There is nowhere they can be but our current home. They are not there.
The manuscripts that Wellesley discusses are mostly in England; she works at the British Library. And, at the very end of her book, she describes one of the reasons why so few of them remain: when Henry VIII left the Church, he dissolved the monasteries, and people were encouraged to loot the buildings as they saw fit. “Although some books were saved, many were used for ignoble purposes: stuffing for scarecrows, mending material for wagons, or wrapping paper.” Libraries that held hundreds of volumes were reduced to a handful. Wellesley quotes John Bale’s 1549 compilation entitled The Laboryouse Journey on the destruction of the monasteries. Bale describes the manuscripts being used for toilet paper—which, I suppose, could have been practical but feels far more like making a point: these books are gone forever, and, furthermore, never should have existed.
I let go of so many of my mother’s things. I tried to find homes for items that would be appreciated, to pass certain small things, a mug, a necklace, along to friends or relatives as mementos. After her funeral, we gathered in her apartment, and I told everyone to take as many books of hers as they wanted. I had made up little name plates in her favorite color that said “Ex Libris.” She had so many books on the bookshelves that spanned the wall of her living room. There were books I remembered from my childhood, books I had purchased for her as gifts, books of mine that I hadn’t wanted to carry with me but that she couldn’t bear to let go. I took boxes of her books with me. I left more boxes behind.
Loving someone is, in part, being their scribe, keeping account of who they were, holding on to their objects as a tribute. The nameless woman with the blue teeth did her work, I’d like to think, from some sense of love. Either love of the divine or of the women she worked with or, perhaps, of her art alone. Licking one’s brush to get the perfect tip feels like a sign of someone who cared about her craft. Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century anchoress, wrote her masterpiece while living a life that was minimalist even by Marie Kondo’s standards. Enclosed within a twelve-foot cell, she detailed her abundant love for God and his love for her. Her words were copied over centuries by other women who loved Julian, Jesus, and self-expression. Or maybe they were illiterate and just liked the shapes of the letters. Whatever it was they loved, it kept Julian’s words alive.
When I was in high school, my mom, while continuing to work full-time as a lawyer, went back to school for a master’s in creative writing. She never completed her final project—the requirement was either a novel or a collection of stories—so she never got the degree. But she held on to every class writing assignment and story-start and pile of notes, and, the night before I left her apartment forever, I stuffed all of them into her suitcase and took it on the plane home with me. These are not fragments in the “fragment novel” sense, but they are the writing done on the margins of everything else in life. My mom wrote when she could, in the space between work and friends and caring for her child and caring for her parents. I couldn’t take everything—no, she would have wanted me to be more precise: I chose not to take everything. I chose to leave behind objects, even beloved objects, things she had specifically told me to give to my children, and I still wake up in the middle of the night feeling guilty about it sometimes. But I took her words with me.
This article was published in Commonweal’s hundredth-anniversary issue, November 2024.
