"A Future That Is Still Hardening Around You..."

"Dad went to town. Made a cake. Wasn't any good. Fred Johnson's pretty sick."

"Almost had fight at school. Got my hair curled. Planning to go home with Mrs. Jones."

"Norman missed school today. Fell down and hurt my finger. Fire in hotel in DeSoto."

These are the everyday events in the life of Genevieve Spencer, a young Illinois farmgirl whose line-a-day journal from 1937 is now available as a daily Twitter feed. This project is courtesy of David Griner, Genny's great-nephew, who started the feed on January 1st. "People seem to enjoy the mixture of monotony and mystery woven through the posts," he says.

It's tempting to forget the restrictions of the line-a-day format and fantasize that this is really all Genny cared to say about these events -- they're so blasé that I can't imagine her being either fazed or excited, just too busy or too disinterested to say any more than a few words about a neighbor's funeral or a bumper crop of persimmons. But this kind of projection is just a microcosm of the great problem of history as we record it; the details give us nothing, and the context is lost to the aether.

Is Genny the perfect Princess of Coins? On paper, perhaps. She is industrious, observant, pragmatic, and admirably consistent in her acknowledgment of life as it passes. She sees only what is right in front of her, allowing herself to remain oblivious to the big picture until she's mature enough to handle it -- she trusts that will come naturally with time.

But all of this is imagination, painting pictures to cover the absence of information. A little girl's dreams and private thoughts, the profound pleasures and miseries of life on the farm in all seasons, the disappointments and wounds felt but never articulated, perhaps never even truly consciously known; how easily all of these realities become supplanted by fantasy! This is the process by which people evolve into symbols and endure, their actual personhood evaporating behind them like the tracks that snails leave. We all do this. We have all already done it.

That's what makes the Princess of Coins such a fascinating card to me; it contains all these earthly elements, but it comes loaded with an incredible amount of hope and enthusiasm for a future that is still hardening around you. This heady mixture of tangible and ephemeral is not just complicated -- it's deeply moving. It's like when I imagine my mother as a child; it seems so unlikely that anyone would ever grow up, invest in this world, and raise a family after the hardships and challenges of life have made themselves known at such a young age. Who could bear to? And yet who can keep from trying?

"Stayed home from school because of a bad cold. Kerby went to Johnsons'. Norman shot a rabbit. He is 8 years old. First one."

"Mr. Mark Patterson killed himself with a shot-gun. Dad went to town. Vernon Gardin came over this evening."

"Wrote to Aunt Dorothy. Today is Sunday." [Via]

Previously on Arcanalogue...