The people who left no letters still had things they could not stop thinking about.

Most people who ever lived left nothing readable. That does not mean they had less inner life, only that their inner life was not written down, or was written down and lost, or was never thought worth keeping. They had the same lying-awake, the same unresolved argument, the same long private preoccupation, and none of it reached us. The silence is about record-keeping, not about depth.

Hold that in mind when you read history and find it populated only by the articulate. And take it as permission about your own record, since keeping something small is how the rest of it survives at all. A few lines a year is more than most people left.