What Remains
Notes from beside what gets left behind
Today I went looking for a word.
Specifically, I wanted to know what you call all the stuff a writer leaves behind.
Not just a manuscript. The notebooks. Letters. Drafts. Research. Files. Marginalia. Half-finished things. The paper trail and increasingly digital archive of a mind at work.
That search led me to the German language.
Vorlass refers to papers or archival material transferred or arranged during a person's lifetime.
And then I found its counterpart.
Nachlass.
The papers, manuscripts, correspondence, and other material left behind after someone dies.
And then there was another word I liked:
Bestand.
An archival holding. A collection. The body of material that has been gathered and exists together as a unit.
Which is slightly different.
Vorlass and Nachlass tell me something about when the material was left.
Bestand makes me think about what happens when somebody gathers all those pieces together and says:
This is the record.
Except is it?
Because an archive can only contain what survived. What someone found. What someone kept. What someone decided belonged there.
The deleted file isn't in the box. The burned letter isn't in the folder. The notebook nobody found isn't in the collection.
And suddenly an archive starts looking less like everything that remains and more like everything that happened to remain.
Well.
There are my books.
VORLASS.
The unfinished manuscript and what she deliberately left.
NACHLASS.
What remains when she isn't there to explain any of it.
And Bestand?
I don't know yet.
But I'm keeping that word.
And suddenly the second book isn't merely “the finished version.”
It can contain everything that happens after the first one exists. The files. The theories. The attempts to understand her notes. The attempts to decipher what she left.
Maybe even the readers themselves.
Because why should I write a book about people solving a mystery when I could hand pieces of the mystery to the people actually reading it?
This idea is getting out of hand.
Excellent.