The Great Cory Library Fieldtrip! Blog 23, The hour of his death

Thurs 7 Aug: From background reading, I know the year, month, date, the very hour, when James Henderson unexpectedly died, aged 62. Henderson, Principal of Lovedale, was among many things a correspondent of Olive Schreiner. Picking my way through his letters to his mother, wife Margaret, son and daughters, I grimly read the letters of 1929 and toll the months down, and then into 1930, month after month; and over time ‘it’ creeps towards him with slow relentlessness. Mr Grim Reaper approaches, watch out! They are all dead, all these people into the traces of whose lives we stick our noses. It’s a funny business when thought of as ‘past lives’. My own approach? It’s not lives but traces, bits of (usually) paper, and it’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle with no picture and many missing pieces.

Last updated: 7 Aug 2014


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