A Fugitive Truth: An Emma Fielding Mystery - By Dana Cameron Page 0,22
The meeting was over. “I’m glad we had this chance to chat. I’ll let you get back to your work, and look forward to hearing your presentation on your work later in the month.”
“Oh, right.” I remembered that one of the obligations of accepting the fellowship was to give a talk on the research conducted there. “Well then, thanks very much for lunch.”
Whitlow shook hands again, cordially, and then we were both able to get back to the essentials of our respective jobs, worlds and philosophies apart.
But after lunch, a switch seemed to have been shut off, and I couldn’t get back into the effortless work patterns I had enjoyed for the past couple of days. I couldn’t concentrate properly and couldn’t figure out why, other than recognizing that I felt out of the mainstream, isolated and somehow bereft. Maybe my eyes were tired, perhaps the euphoria of starting a new project had worn off a little, but even Madam Chandler seemed to have lost her vitality in the face of a sweltering summer in Massachusetts. Her handwriting was more cramped than it had been, and more than ever, it was more frequently punctuated with the long strings of numbers. Whatever was troubling her—the entries were terse and made references to situations that I didn’t yet fully understand—seemed to have infected me as well. I finally left early and decided that I would go for a run, but when I got up to my room, I was so dispirited, I flopped down on the bed for a nap.
When I awoke in what must have been hours later, it was dark and freezing; March had been reclaimed by a wintry low. Outside my lofty window, the deciduous trees were still barren, and I knew without seeing that the bare ground was brown and raw, carefully raked but badly scarred by the winter. The bluish-black shadows seemed made to order for the haughty isolation of the place.
Oh, come on, Emma, I chided myself, one more minute and you’ll be finding yourself in Mr. Squeer’s academy, or turning into one of Jane Eyre’s unfortunate schoolmates. You’ve been lonely and depressed before, it will go away in the morning. Call home, see what Brian’s doing. It’s not like you’re trapped on the moors or anything, so stop feeling sorry for yourself.
I realized then that I was feeling sorry for myself, wondering of what value all my work was if somewhere down the road, polite, efficient types like Whitlow would clear it all away for what was judged to be more important. Was it worth my trying to resurrect Madam Chandler’s life if the remnants of it might be scattered to who knew where, simply because she was not well known or because she’d not written a famous book? And what point was archaeology anyway? It didn’t solve any of the world’s problems. Wasn’t it rather self-involved of me to make up these little questions and answer them for myself and a tiny little audience?
Old, familiar questions reemerged to haunt me, the same ones that arose when I was a teenager working in the field, deciding if I would follow in my irascible grandfather Oscar’s footsteps and become an archaeologist.
When I’d raised these philosophical quandaries with Oscar, at first he’d just grunted. “I’d be a shitty dentist. The world doesn’t need any more shitty dentists, but it sure as hell could use a few more really first-rate archaeologists.” When he saw that his answer wasn’t helping me, he’d put down his trowel, stopped working, and spoke very seriously. It was, and remained, one of the most important moments of my life.
“Human beings are funny,” he’d said. “Oftentimes they treat the past like an eccentric old relative, something to drag out for special occasions and ignore until the next time they need an example of why things are better now than they were in the bad old days—or vice versa. We modern Americans are the worst like that. But humans need to see where they’ve come from. They use the past to make sense of how they live, they need the past to tell them how to move ahead, to give them positive and negative examples. It makes them feel a part of things too. And maybe, with any luck, if we use these big brains we’re so proud of, we’ll figure out how to make fewer of the mistakes we seem to always be making if we pay as much attention to the past as