“My name is Norman Leonard Norris, and I reside at Gordon College, Rawalpindi Pakistan. The following is my statement of events which occurred during a mountain climbing expedition on Mankial Peak in Swat, Pakistan. After reaching the summit of the peak on September 17, 1966, I, Miss Ulricha, and Mr. John MacArther [sic] began our descent at approximately 4:00 p.m. on the same day. After two hours of descent, darkness fell. We decided to stay put on the mountain for the night. We found a ledge and spent the night there. During the course of the night, snow fell, adding to our discomfort. There were no complaints from any members of the party except for being very cold. On the morning of September 18, we were all in reasonably good health. At about 6:00 am we tied ourselves together with our nylon rope — which was in good condition — and proceded [sic] down the mountain with MacArther in the lead, Ulricha second and myself in the rear. MacArther had the rope tied around his waist. The upper stage of the descent posed no problems, but due to snowfall in the night, the center section of the snow field became difficult. At about the same time further snow began to fall. We were walking in three to four inches of snow. However, halfway between the peak and camp #2, MacArther apparently became disengaged from the rope, unnoticed by me. I first realized he was not on the rope when I heard a shout from him indicating he was slipping. Because of poor visibility he disappeared from sight. The snow-covered ground apparently avalanched with him as there were no drop-offs or crevasses in this area. My personal estimate would be that he must have been carried 1500 to 2000 feet in the avalanching snow down the steep incline of the snowfield. Shortly after, Ulricha and I were caught in avalanching snow, as a result of which Miss Ulricha died. And further deponent saith not.”

Up until my discovery of this lurid green Foreign Service affidavit online, a few months after my fifteenth birthday, I knew almost nothing about my grandfather’s death.  Speaking with my elderly grandmother, I learned that he was a capable, adventurous, and intelligent engineer, and that at the time of the accident he was building a dam for the Pakistani government. But before that moment, the only details I had were scraped together from my father’s rare reminiscences of the event that had upturned his childhood. It was a strange way to learn of my grandfather’s terrifying end: in terse, clinical prose, on the desktop in my mother’s office. Only later, in the family house I had grown up visiting, did I begin to piece together who he really was.      

St. Regis Falls, population 432, is a village that sits on the northernmost edge of the Adirondack Park. Its once-prosperous center is now a hollow skeleton of boarded windows and broken glass. Despite living so far north that most of the radio is in Quebecois, you can sometimes glimpse Confederate flags pinned up in the windows of mobile homes. The largest employer is the state prison system; the largest business, Walmart. Yet, despite its dilapidation, St. Regis Falls remains striking, bordered by pine forests, wetlands, and small mountains crowned with fire towers. A fifteen-minute drive into the heart of these woods brings you to a somber yellow structure peeking through tall evergreens onto a lake. 

One summer afternoon, when the heat and the deer flies kept me inside, I found myself rifling through piles of documents that sat underneath a film of dust and bat droppings. In one crate, I found a course selection catalog and a notebook that read, in crisp crimson font, “Harvard College.” Inside the leather cover, I saw the name, scrawled in pencil: “J. R. MacArthur.” A shiver went down my spine. 

I read on and learned that, as a young man, my grandfather had taken an ambitious array of classes in intellectual history, English literature, French, and musicology—remarkably parallel to my own interests. I flipped through pages of shorthand: “Schoenberg—takes the ‘passing’ or ‘transition’ note and incorporates it into an original chord. Chord built in 4ths instead of 3rds. Perfect 4th and augmented 4th.” These sporadic observations gradually faded, replaced by sketches of young men in jacket and tie, studies of noses, and other marks I could not decipher. His attention reappeared, of course, when the professor began to note the upcoming exam, circled multiple times.

For hours, I leafed through bits of ephemera—books that had been marked up, doodles, and yearbooks. As I scanned the pages, I began to form a picture of my grandfather. And in the act of reconstructing who he was, of paying careful attention to how and what he read, I began to understand where many of my interests had come from and how they had trickled down to my father and ultimately to me. 

The books in that crate—from differential calculus and physics textbooks to Henry James’s short stories, Emerson’s lectures, and Tacitus’ Annals—formed a perhaps mythical portrait of a young man divided between the family trade and his humanistic interests. Blurred photos of him running at lightning pace and notes from athletic companions and admirers in his yearbook showed me his impressive athleticism and love for the outdoors, something that has lived on—despite it being the cause of his father’s death—in my father. (Much to his chagrin, it has not lived on in me.) 

Odds and ends, paper receipts crumpled and forgotten in pockets, pencil marks in books, journal entries—after we are gone, these are the things that we leave behind. These traces of humanity, unrefined and produced for private use, enable us to reach deep into the core of the historical actor. It is only through them that we can be understood; official, edited documents can only give us the contours of a life. My grandfather’s life may have been cut tragically short, but through these artifacts that he left behind, I came to know him and to commune with him. By reading him and how he read, coloring that picture with information as well as intuition, I conjured his spirit from the dead and let it breathe another breath in my imagination.

I arrived at Princeton intent on becoming a history major, thinking that it was a natural extension of my love of entering and exploring past lives. But, after writing seminar, I quickly found that the academy seemed to want a different type of reading and writing than that which had so attracted me. Writing seminar—that soul-crushingly dogmatic bootcamp—taught me that the scholarly idiom called for methodological clarity and concision. Expressive, belletristic prose was not to infiltrate the realm of the scholar, for style itself has an ideological surplus value.

But while I got a kick out of this ‘difficult’ or ‘serious’ kind of reading and writing, it did not fulfill my spiritual core. I could not unwind the almost voyeuristic impulse to read documents for the pleasure of accessing another subjectivity and space. 

As I now attempt to write the histories of those of whom there is scant material record, I have rediscovered the fulfillment that I felt poring over my grandfather’s notebooks. As a discipline, history toes the line between humanistic disciplines like English and comparative literature and social science disciplines like sociology, politics, anthropology, and human geography. History not only allows for but requires that we reconcile the beauty and hermeneutical flexibility of the former with the analytical rigor and political applicability of the latter. 

“Historical narrative,” wrote the eminent Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “is a particular bundle of silences.” The shape and location of these silences are at the historian’s discretion, and thus the work of history is inseparable from ideology. But, as Trouillot recognized, the contours of these silences are political in a second sense: the survival of primary sources and, indeed, the means of writing and reading are functions of social power. As the discipline turns its gaze toward filling in gaping silences, the historian’s labor will necessarily become a more interpretive one.

The raw materials of the historian are primary sources, out of which he wrings meaning. Whether scrutinizing ledgers or receipts, I now read archival documents entranced by the specters of those who made, touched, or were affected by them. I no longer suppress this mode of reading; I lean into it.