12 August 2023: "Yet I must also confess to feeling a personal sense of loss. The moment that readers of Mark Twain’s Literary Resources open the Annotated Guide and the detailed Reader’s Guide, they will instantly absorb as much as I have ever known about these subjects. I will no longer be privileged to answer telephone and email inquiries such as those that arrived for decades. But then I remind myself that this act of letting go, of sharing everything one has learned, is, after all, what investigative scholarship must always have as its ultimate and unselfish goal” (xxi).
Still thinking about this beautiful excerpt from Alan Gribben's introduction to the second volume of his monumental Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading, Volume Two, the product of over fifty years of his scholarly labor. My eyes got a bit teary reading these words and being reminded of why literary scholars do the work we do. It's been on my mind today, too, as I toil away at my own (much, much humbler) book and the "Year's Work" essay.
Work Cited
No comments:
Post a Comment