Gerald R. Gill Papers

June 9, 2022

Today, I got an email from Tufts about their Juneteenth Observance Ceremony next week.

As part of it, theyā€™re displaying the new Gerald R. Gill Papers Exhibit. Gill was a History professor at Tufts until he passed away in 2007. His daughter donated ā€œmore than 50 boxes of material documenting Professor Gillā€™s life and work,ā€ which ā€œdocument Gillā€™s teaching, research, and the experiences of Black faculty, staff, and students at Tufts.ā€

Thatā€™s incredible. 50 boxes. In fact, another Tufts article describes it as nearly 150 boxes.

Thereā€™s something inspiring to me about having your lifeā€™s work documented on papers in boxes. The idea that you could leaf through those pages and dive into the smallest details of someoneā€™s life. That the things you thought and did are recorded and will live on; that someone someday will pick up the paper and imagine what it was like to write those words.

Perhaps itā€™s just the thought that someone will care about my experiences after Iā€™m gone. That feeling is related to what Iā€™m trying to do with this website: to create a vast pile of my thoughts in writing, in the hopes that someone will read them. Even the fact that people read them now makes me so happy.

One day, Iā€™d love to also have boxes of papers that document my lifeā€™s work. The kind of sheer volume of writing that you can fill a room with, and leaf through to transport yourself into another time and cluster of thoughts.

The first step to that is writing a lot. And as you can see, Iā€™m trying.

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