A Letter ... and Treasure?

This morning, my mom showed me a three-page letter that one of our friends from Austria bought from E-bay. It was dated back to 1875, and our friend believed it to be written by an archaeologist. He said it might even include a location of a hidden treasure. The letter was in English, written in an old writing that was difficult to read at times, so he wanted some help deciphering it, so my mom printed it out and we worked on trying to discover what word each scribble meant. It was pretty fun and we did well at figuring out what the letter said, but there were still a few illegible words.

It turned out to be a letter about a Reverend thanking someone (presumably a friend or another acquaintance). I did a bit of research online, and it turned out that the Reverend had written many other letters about the parish and church. It is not quite clear why the author of the letter was thanking the recipient, and some of the letter made absolutely no grammatical sense, but what was clear was that it was definitely not a letter about hidden treasure.

Despite the dismay about the treasure (or maybe because of it?), I came to think about the time during which the author wrote the letter - and what he would have changed knowing that someone would read it and attempt to decipher it, if he would have changed anything at all with that knowledge - rather than the content of the letter. The thought that someone might read his letter 136 years later most likely never even began to enter his mind. Even if he did know that someone would read it all this time later, would he have known anything about what the world would be like after 136 years? Would he have written anything else or would he have written in a different manner? I believe that these questions will probably remain unanswered, and that belief is strengthened even more when I think about the gap between then and now. There's so many differences that I begin to wonder what I would do in a similar situation. If I knew that my words would be read in over 130 years, would I write anything differently? I'm not sure if I could, since I have no idea what the future will bring, since I know that everything could - and probably will - be different: our lifestyle, our technology, our handwriting (as seen when I thought about common modern handwriting compared to his) ... maybe even the language we speak and write.

Back to the treasure ... I was thinking about the power of words and what strength they seem to convey through their meaning and age. Maybe everything contains a bit of treasure in its own way. Maybe when you see a picture of darkness, there's a speck of light somewhere in the distance. Maybe if you see a painting of a desert landscape with a hand reaching for a seemingly empty water bottle, there's a few little droplets left inside. Maybe words, no matter their content, always contain a little bit of treasure and a little bit of hope - like that speck of light and those little droplets of water - although we might not see any at first. Maybe the treasure is right in front of you, and maybe you just have to dig around a little to find the X that marks the spot. Maybe - just maybe - all words carry more of a treasure than they seem to carry. As the saying goes, things aren't always what they seem.