To who, or what, may be reading these words …
Preview:
The most incisive comment I ever heard about writing is: “Writing is easy. I just sit down and write what occurs to me. It’s the occurring that’s hard.” The hardest occurring that has occurred for me in recent years has involved the assignment to write messages for time capsules, packages to be sealed away for examination on some far-distant date.
Deciding what to say wasn’t always quite so difficult. Contributors to a 1924 time capsule — unveiled in September in centennial celebrations of the Memorial Union at Purdue University, where I worked — anticipated correctly that it would be opened on its due date by people like them, at an institution they would recognize, in a country called the United States. When the request came to prepare its replacement, aimed at an opening a century hence, any such assumptions gave reason to pause.
Originally published: July 22, 2025
Author: Mitch Daniels
Position: President Emeritus
Institution: Purdue University
Published by: The Washington Post