July 9, 2006
Sunday 

Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be driven.
                     — Jean Paul Richter, 1763-1825
                         Bavarian writer who originated the concept of the doppelganger

When I chose “The Silken Tent” as the controlling image for my site, I meant to call to mind the cords which proceed from the structure’s “central cedar pole, that is its pinnacle to heavenward and signifies the sureness of the soul.” I saw myself as a strong woman clothed in a flowing gown and anchored to all the people and things I care about by “countless silken ties of love and thought.” There are many cords, for I have many roles and myriad interests. I am, among other things, mother, wife, and friend, writer, reader, and scholar, church member, citizen, keeper of the house and maker of the meals, dabbler in art and aficionado of cemeteries. I have many projects underway and notes for dozens more, and I might have more success actually finishing things if new ones didn’t keep popping up.

This morning the thought that serves as today’s epigraph lodged in my mind. I knew it first from a greeting card I bought some years ago to send to a bereaved friend. I’d forgotten, if I ever knew, its source, so this morning I googled* the phrase in search of documentation for it.

The first return led me to an image of a handwritten inscription made by Anna Josephine Savage on October 17, 1896. She wrote, “Memory is the only Paradise, of which we can never be deprived; may all of yours be happy ones.” Other returns gave variations (“evicted,” “expelled,” “ejected”) and a variety of attributions, including Jean Paul Richter, just plain “Jean Paul,” Robert Musil (an early-twentieth-century Austrian novelist who probably read Richter), and those famous wits who are always being quoted, “somebody” and “anonymous.”

I decided to go with Jean (Johann) Paul Richter as the most likely source. I found a credible-looking page about him within a site maintained by the German department of the University of Leeds in England. The project is a study of writers and artists of the grotesque in nineteenth-century European Romanticism. The version of the thought most often attributed to Richter is “Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be driven.”

Of course, after I determined the true source of the idea, I had to find out who Anna Josephine Savage was and why a piece of writing in her hand was posted on the internet. It turns out that the image is part of an autograph book maintained by Trella Foltz Toland from 1894 to 1905. Mrs. Toland was the oldest child of Clara Shortridge Foltz (1849–1934), the first woman lawyer on the Pacific coast. Trella, born in 1866, became an actress in both San Francisco and New York. Widowed twice, she died in 1912. The information about her is presented by Professor Barbara Babcock of Stanford Law School, who is Clara Foltz’s biographer.

Many of the autographs are from other performers as well as writers and public figures. Anna Josephine Savage’s identity is listed as “unknown,” but since her autograph follows that of Richard Henry Savage, a well-known novelist of the day, and is inscribed on the same date, one might conclude that she was somehow related to him.

What brought to mind today the idea of memory as a permanent paradise was the fact that I have spent most of the weekend reliving my 2005 trip to Wyoming. The pieces I wrote about it were residing in space I hold at Typepad, a hosted weblog service that uses a version of the publishing platform Movable Type. Before I had WordPress, I couldn’t post when I was traveling because I rarely had a high-speed connection with access to file transfer protocol software. Now that I can post to silkentent.com from any computer, I don’t need the space at Typepad. My contract is paid only through the end of this month, so I need to move material away from there if I want to save it and disengage from Typepad.

Going through the Wyoming pieces was a joy, but it also reminded me that I never uploaded any of the more than 250 pictures I took out west. Looking at the pictures and deciding how to organize them and where to put them reminded me that the writing I did about the trip was incomplete. Because I wanted to be having adventures instead of sitting at the computer four hours a day, I kept the pieces short, and I skipped a lot. So I went back and read my paper journal notes, and got out the memorabilia that is still in the same storage tub I put it in this time last year.

I could have done more work today on moving out the Typepad material or finishing the Wyoming project. But I went down a side road, learning about a strong woman who made her way as a single mother in the nineteenth century and her lovely daughter who met so many interesting people. They engaged the fiction writer in me. Maybe I could imagine Anna Josephine Savage as an autograph-seeker herself who is surprised that an actress she admires should want hers.

I mean this site to be a sort of autobiography-in-progress. But perhaps I will have to echo Clara Shortridge Foltz, who never ran out of things to do but also never completed her own story: “Someday an inquisitive biographer will find these many scrapbooks that lumber my study, and write [my] biography.”

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*”Google” was recently added to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb meaning “to use the Google search engine to seek online information.” You could look it up.

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