READING 14 ︎︎︎ Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep

DIGITAL ARCHIVE 

There is a particular sweetness in the small archives we build, often without meaning to. Notes scrawled in margins, unfinished projects, essays uploaded to a quiet corner of the internet. I like to imagine these things persisting somehow — a scatter of traces left for the future. I think of my children one day finding them. A way of stepping back into the voice I once had, the thoughts. It feels natural to believe these remnants will outlast me. As if once something has been given shape — a sentence, an image — it carries its own momentum forward.

But not everything persists. I was reminded of this while listening to The Safekeep, a novel that moves almost unexpectedly into the issue of cultural genocide. There is a moment when a character speaks of her mother’s journals — how they were kept, then taken. How something as ordinary as a record of days could be made vulnerable, even dangerous. I think about the ways an archive can be erased. Not by accident, but by force. That a life could be made  invisible by simply undoing its traces.

I grew up believing the internet was forever. It was drilled into us — a warning more than a promise. Be careful what you post, everyone said; a single photo could follow you for life. There was a sense of permanence, of irrevocability. And maybe that fear left an imprint, even when the fear itself faded. When I upload an essay now, I still half-believe that I am placing it somewhere durable, somewhere my children might find it one day. But the truth is far less solid. My archive is tied to a company, a server, a chain of contingencies. If one link breaks — if I stop paying, if the infrastructure shifts — what I imagine as permanent collapses. What I offer might not survive the offering. And still, there is something real in the gesture: the act of handing a piece of myself outward, even into uncertainty.

Walter Benjamin wrote about history not as a grand, unbroken narrative, but as something pieced together from scraps. A constellation of remnants, glimpsed only in flashes. For Benjamin, the task of remembrance was urgent because forgetting was the natural drift of things — not just the forgetting of empires, but the forgetting of small lives, ordinary gestures. It was always an act of resistance against erasure.

In September 1940, fleeing Nazi-occupied France, Benjamin attempted to cross the Pyrenees into Spain. He wore plain clothes and carried a heavy black briefcase. He was not young and he was not strong, but he walked because he had to. He died at the border in a small hard town called Portbou. It was likely suicide by morphine. Whatever he had carried so devotedly was never found.

Now we build different kinds of archives. Clouds, servers, scrolls of disappearing messages. We offer up our stories to systems we do not own, to infrastructures that could collapse or betray us. It is easy to imagine that the record will endure — that what we write, photograph, or post will be carried forward, flotsam in the churning gut of the Internet.  But nothing is guaranteed. Power shifts. Networks vanish. Stories are overwritten, buried, burned. In a moment that already feels swept by a strange forgetting, I wonder what will remain.







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