As a new grandmother I’m certainly not skimping on the photos or the ink — or what passes as digital ink, the keystrokes that allow me to describe in detail all the glories of my new grandchildren.

But a passage in a book I was re-reading last night brought to mind a time when recording one’s life was near to impossible and led to an odd sort of epistolary cohabitation. 

At the end of Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, Cromwell writes at his desk. “Paper is precious. Its offcuts and remnants are not discarded, but turned over, reused.” As a result, he finds the penmanship of Cardinal Wolsey, his departed friend, “a hasty computation, a discarded draft,” Mantel writes. But Cromwell “had to put down his pen till the spasm of grief passed.”

Imagine what our world would be if we had to reuse the scrap paper of our friends and neighbors. Would it help us see the world from another perspective? Would it bring us together?

The answer, I’m afraid, is clear: It certainly didn’t help the 16th century.