Unwitnessed Decisions: A Note from the Archive

The archive holds four thousand letters and not one record of the moment anybody changed their mind. Decisions arrive in the correspondence already made, wearing their reasons like a coat put on at the door. The interesting part happened earlier, alone, and was not written down because it did not yet know it was interesting.

This is the ordinary condition of a life and I do not propose to abolish it. But an institution which lasts fifty years will accumulate a great many unwitnessed decisions, and it will discover, late, that its character was formed by them rather than by its minutes.

So we do the small thing available to us: we say things out loud, to one person, before we act on them. Not for approval. For the record that a second person existed at the time.

No decision is wholly private once it enters the continuity of a shared life.

I have written that sentence before and members have twice asked me to clarify it. I decline, not from mystery, but because both of the readings people fear are true and the difference between them is a matter of who is doing the reading.

At the gathering in November the question was put to me directly and I gave a poor answer. I have had the intervening months to prepare a better one and I find that I have not.