This is something I wrote in the middle Obama years and recently pulled from the vault. Back then, the cloud wasn't a thing, so backing up to the cloud wasn't as easy as it is now. You don't hear many people mourning lost data in crashed hard drives like we used to.
In late 2003, the hard drive of my laptop failed, silently and irrevocably, but it didn’t need fizzing or crackling to have an explosive’s effect on my life. When the hard drive went it took ten years of work with it – my journalism to date, a major portion of the fiction I’d ever written, as well as my academic work, unpolished essays, bibliographies, and a dissertation.
Spare me another boo-hoo tale from a knucklehead writer, you’re thinking. Indeed, this isn’t that sort of story, not one about loss. It’s a story of return – like Odysseus to the land of the shades.
In the years immediately after that hard drive crash, I worked through the five stages of computer grief (panic, denial, anger, technophobia, and shopping for a new hard drive) quickly. The loss of photos I mourned. An extensive email archive and records of IM chats with the woman who became my fiancee. Hundreds of browser bookmarks pointing to articles I was collecting for a book. Some old letters to friends. All of this, personal and irreplaceable, I wished I hadn’t lost. (Though this will prove to be a comic tale with a bittersweet ending, the moral is the same as in the tragic version: Back. Up. Your. Data.)
Most of the losses I accepted easily. In fact, once the grief of losing certain files had faded, I realized what a burden they’d been. Short story outlines. Dozens of well-written scenes, many of them beginnings, like half-built bridges. I had folders littered with chunks of text laying around unglued by any conceit. Outlines for novels. My novice academic’s identity was similarly supported by notes for ambitious essays and half-written arguments that never stood up and walked on their own. Bibliographies. Conference presentations that could become articles. Of course, the dissertation, which should become…what? The folders of my hard drive where these things resided felt like a crypt of the textual living dead which, on the times I dared enter, trapped me and sucked my energy. Fix me! Heal me! they clamored. Don’t let me stay here, don’t let me die here! What a waste, what a wasted life. You know you want to write it, so just plan it out and do it, shame on you if you don’t. Then came the curse. You must be lazy.
My ouevre, my tarbaby.
Sometimes I would sink my fists into something and pull it free, but most ventures to this crypt gave me nausea, my stomach roiled by the rough deep of the unfinished. So the hard drive's collapse came as something of a relief. Someone took a crack at retrieval with some disk utility tools but I never chased recovery any frrther. I thought, maybe it's better to let it sink once and for all – I wasn't pursuing academia, so my dissertation could remain unpublished, and twiddling with short stories seemed like a waste of time. Maybe my optimism seems perverse: when life gives you a housefire, feel relieved that the junk's finally out of the attic. Or maybe that feeling is closer to the reality than I knew.
I moved forward. I went fishing in other waters. I wrote, researched, took notes for projects and actually finished them. Once in a while I'd hit a patch of longing for an unrequited story, in the way you regret never catching the giant dappled trout you once wrestled under the bridge, but I still felt free. And I imagined that the trout enjoyed its freedom, too.
It felt grander having been lost.
Yet something odd happened. I kept moving forward – right into the past. This past summer, I realized that some stuff I'd been writing about over a period of years was necessary in order to grapple with personal ghosts. I couldn't reconstruct the detailed notes of conversations and events or the ruminations; I had to have them back, in the flesh.
It turns out that most disappeared data isn't really dead. It lingers. It hides. With the right forensic prowess, time, and money, one can retrieve it. By now everyone's heard stories about the MIT scientists who salvage hard drives from recycled computers and pull off tax records, bank account numbers, and other personal information, or how terrorists and child pornographers can be implicated with evidence taken from a smashed or burned computer. Well, you can do that ordinary, legal data, too. A couple of weeks ago I paid a forensic data recovery company (and did I pay? Reader, I paid) to exhume whatever data it could find on the hard drive, half a decade after I thought it had all gone to its final grave.
The mail brought a cardboard mailer on two CDs. How much does an intellectual identity weigh? About a gigabyte. How much does peace of mind cost? This time about $1400. I immediately begin picking through files, ignoring the software applications and heading for content. Two and a half years isn't a long time, but I felt like an archaeologist in a tomb. Most of the files were there, all the unused remnants of stories and essays as mute to their destiny as the last time I'd looked at them. They were strangely timeless, like an uncorrupted saint's corpse.
The comedy of it all is that the document I wanted most, the one I'd aimed to get, no longer existed. There was an icon, but when I clicked it, the message flashed, "There is no default application specified to open the document." I was relieved that some academic essays were also lost. And short stories, bona fide juvenalia, had vanished. So I was still free.
The dissertation's intact, in its bloated entirety. (The universe does have a sense of humor.)
My email inbox, frozen on October 25, 2003, is there. A slice of my interactive life, a representation of my person. Some of the names I don't remember, and the topics are unfamiliar, though I wrote about them heartily at the time.
There's a month-by-month and often daily account of my writing and business activities as I was transitioning from academia to a writing life. I'd forgotten about this entirely but feel glad to have it back, and I'm glad to be living now, not then.
There are notes – not really journals, more like fieldnotes from the outback of life, in which I tell about things that happen or cut and paste emails and annotate them. In isolation they made no sense, but strung with others they make an arc, and the patterns become clear, maybe clear enough to write something someday. Until then I'll leave them be.
Then, as I was scanning the CDs, I opened a file, read its contents, and knew exactly how to shape what was there. So I pulled it out and rewrote it and sent it to an editor. He didn't take it, but that’s okay, because I've revisited the crypt again to work on another piece, which I've also sent out. Perhaps what frees me is that I feel no obligation to these words – I've lost them once, I can lose them again, but until they're mine to pound and shape.
My ouevre, my briarpatch.
