Going forward to Yesterday

.  It has been a lifetime preoccupation for me: testing my wits to use clues resourcefully to reconstruct the past.  As early as I can remember in childhood I was interested in astronomy, wherein the light from stars reaching us is all from a prior time.  And most of the rest of my life has been spent in a profession where, essentially, I help others to recover resources written, spoken or uploaded at some past time.

 .   I have little formal training in theology, but at the Yale Divinity School Library where I once was employed as a clerk, the words and works of saints and scholars permeated my workday  atmosphere.  The big buzz in those years was the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some ancient parchment documents secreted in a cave in the hills of Israel.  Just the possibility that these materials date from the time of Jesus, and might even be from a monastic community that he was associated with or had visited, electrified everyone.

.  There are many people today who can read ancient Aramaic and Hebrew.  So the language of the texts presented few problems for the professors at Yale and elsewhere.  But the word "scrolls" overstates their condition.  Few were intact. Most were damaged, and some of the precious findings were scattered shards requiring hours of attempting to piece them together to reform a cohesive readable page.

.  Photographs of representative examples were very accessible and could even be found in popular books and magazines.  It was then that I became enamored with the nearly impossible task of physical and intellectual reconstruction of texts having few contextual clues.  (The Essenes, who had stored the Scrolls two thousand years ago, were a secretive Jewish religious  sect about which little is known even now.)

.  I will never be a Scroll scholar.  But from time to time I have experienced the quest vicariously.  Now to the present story.  For years I had kept in my office a scrap that had broken off some government publication in our Library's collections.  I wanted to restore it to the book it came from, but I procrastinated and it stayed in a box waiting years for inspiration to strike me.  Now I am trying to wind down my office in preparation for retirement.  I came across this shard and decided to put my years of experience to a test:  find the document it came from, having only the clues that the incomplete text itself could provide. 

.  In our work we assist people all the time to fill in the missing pieces of a citation.  In these cases only one or a few elements are missing or misquoted.  Think about this.  What are the chances of identifying the book from which a random page came -- incomplete at that -- and with absolutely no indication whatsoever of its source?  I took on the challenge!  More in a later story when and if I solve it.