Valck spent his last thirteen years drafting and redrafting an unsent self-defense letter

Evidence

But who was to be trusted? He did not want his condemnation to become public. It was only for certain ears, to protect “our name.” Selective reportage proved to be a poor option and Valck paid dearly for it. His dismissal was honorable, thanks only to the intervention of his well-placed friend Norman Levyssohn and his Uncle van Rees, both members of the Raad van Indië. The latter offered to help him get a post at the colonial depot in the Netherlands if he “still felt so inclined.” He must not have been, for Valck was to spend the last thirteen years of a desultory life in a single labor: composing draft after draft, sometimes scribbled, sometimes excruciatingly neat, of that unsent letter accounting for his actions in the dim hope of redeeming his honor. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1435

Categorization

• XREF: The repeated-refusal-to-send letter evokes the unsent-letter motif and self-accounting that resonates with colonial archival self-fashioning literatures (also reminiscent of the unsent letter trope in Novalis/Romantic writing).