“The taste for the archive is rooted in these encounters with the silhouettes of the past, be they faltering or sublime. There is an obscure beauty in so many existences barely illuminated by words, in confrontation with each other, imprisoned by their own devices as much as they were undone by their era” (46).
On January 12, 2023, I was working with an archival document at the Keep, and it was a letter that was written on November 15, 1914. The letter that Faith received was written to her by none other than Lytton Strachey. The letter had a silky texture to it, and with the exception of the browned edges, it appeared as though it had been written no more than a short while ago. It smelled like an old book. Ink was used to write the letter that Lytton Strachey penned on a sheet of paper. The letter indicates that Lytton was both slothful and not in the mood to write a letter to the recipient. Before I read this letter, I was aware that the majority of people who were a part of the Bloomsbury group thought that he was a slacker and a bit of an outcast. I thought it was rather amusing when Lytton Strachey admitted honestly that he was too lazy to write a letter and that was the reason he wasn't in the mood to do so. Even in relatively insignificant facets of his life, such as his correspondence, Strachey was unable to maintain objectivity, despite the fact that he maintained throughout his entire career that he was impartial. In this piece, he writes a letter to Faith, in which he first thanks her in advance for understanding that he was too lazy to respond to her letter, and then proceeds to demand that she wait until she sees him in person to get an actual response from him. It demonstrates just how pretentious he actually was.