Decrypting History

June 8, 2025

No one who can read can clean an attic. I read that somewhere. I believe it.

There is in my house a space we call the mouse room because that is where the old tower-type workstation computers were, keyboards, monitors, mice and all, back when I used them. The most recent one is still there under the desk and is probably 20 years old by now.

I still like to work in the mouse room, when I can find the top of the desk. Today I went in there to look for it. Think: archaeological dig.

Now, the desk is visible again. All the pens are in one place, all the pencils in another. File folders filed. Notebooks stacked. I can actually sit in the chair.

A bookcase lines the wall behind the desk. It holds reference books I have not opened in a long time, shrouded in their dust jackets like ghosts of ambitions unpursued. I intended to learn everything in those books. They look good as new, uncreased: the math I never mastered, the coding languages I stopped using, the electronics I did not wire together.

I think I have too many books, but ghosts are stubborn spirits who cherish their haunts. They defend the volume wherein they repose when I reach to remove.

Open it! they insist. See before you the very page where you stopped. Surely, going one page farther would tell you something you have long wanted to know? Not now, of course; soon, perhaps? Just put this book back on the shelf and allow yourself to come back when it may give you joy.

They are devils, such ghosts.

Yet, they speak truth. I pulled out a 1976 book by Niklaus Wirth, Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs in which he rigorously defines modern computer coding concepts. Fifty years before, in 1926, no-one used such concepts because there were no computers. Fifty years since, in 2025, after vast advances in computer hardware, everyone still organizes data and the code to work with it along the lines that Wirth laid out.

It is a foundational book. However, I have not been in there for decades because Wirth uses the Pascal language to illustrate his text and I stopped writing code in Pascal after the 1980s.

It falls open to a page where Wirth explains the benefits of including a type-specifier in user-defined data structures. Sure enough, that bit of insight had been eluding me in a small coding project I was working on for Roger Wagner’s MakerPort. I write this shortly after completing the project, type-specifier included.

I yield. What stoops an old man is the burden of his unfinished business. What stands him back up straight again is a plausible prospect of completion. Better these shelves than my shoulders to bear the weight of old books until my interest revives.

The title of this article began as a pun: crypt as a repository for dead dreams; decrypt meaning to remove from the crypt, that is, to exhume the corpus on the way to discarding it. Now I see that old ambitions for learning never die; they hibernate, sleeping as one does who dozes off reading, a finger between the pages to mark the place. Only open the crypt and they awake, color flowing back into them like fresh air.

No one who still desires to read can purge a bookcase. I write quietly at the desk, soothed by soft snores and pillowmumbles of the ghosts. How kind of them, to keep my unfinished dreams within such easy reach. Leave them there. The mouse room is clean enough and I have other work to do. Let them sleep.