A comment on purpose

9 July 2006 at 10:31 am (Reminiscence)

Dear readers,

I ask your indulgence as I skip around the times in my father’s life, as I explore his writings, and record them here. Perhaps many of you have enjoyed the poetry from his 30s during the 1970s, yet may find much of the writing from his 20s droll or uninspiring. When I set out to copy down his words, whatever I could find in the remains of his belongings, from across the span of his life, I didn’t imagine they would gain a loyal following. But I see, from reading the blog and feed stats, that at least 15 or 20 readers a day stop by to see what I recount here.

My father was a man. His humanity was his greatest strength, a value for which (humanity qua humanity) I have absorbed as a principal measure of worth. I wonder at a lifetime. I have books on my shelves that contain the collected works of this or that historical figure (Plato, Edgar Allan Poe, Keats & Shelley, Rembrandt’s etchings, Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks). Spare books, some more burgeoned with items than others, gathering dust or dusting the air as I open their pages. Do they contain the person’s life? Surely not.

But they remain a tangible record of their lives, just as the leavings of my father’s writing, the tidbits of what remain. I believe much of his words have been lost to time and circumstance, basement floodings, random accidents of moving, willful destruction or abandonment. And some of them exist in duplicate and triplicate, multiple reworkings across decades of time, new titles assigned, old titles rejected.

This blog is meant, for me, as a place to organize these writings, without having to organize a plan before. Perhaps I will seek to publish these some day. Likely I will seek to edit them, selecting some, putting others aside. This is a journey for me, to better understand his life, the motions of his ideas and regrets, his errors and his triumphs.

I am a man of 38, two boys, a wife, and a firm appreciation for the trials he went through, as I go through many myself. I have a PhD, having completed the dissertation just months after my father passed, having worked on it daily during those final months of his life. Page iv of that document reads simply: This dissertation is lovingly dedicated to the memory of my father, Norman Arnold Pearl (July 8, 1935 – November 9, 2004), who should have lived to see it done. My second son, Edison Norman, was born a month after my father died, the fruit of yet another labor I wished that he had seen.

But, the living go on living, and the dead remain to be unveiled, uncovered, reviled, revealed, discovered, adored, contemplated, romanticized, despised, and sometimes simply remembered. They can not defend themselves, nor praise themselves. It is for the living to take them apart and rebuild them anew, and hopefully in that process learn much about themselves, and how to continue living their lives. And that is what this blog is all about.