The lighthouse keeper kept meticulous logs, recording wind, tide, and the passage of every vessel in a hand that never wavered. Yet on the pages reserved for personal remarks he wrote nothing at all, leaving a column of blank squares stretching back forty years. Visitors who admired his diligence assumed the empty column signaled a man with little to say. Those who knew him understood it differently: the silence was not absence but a refusal, a deliberate withholding from a record he suspected would one day be read by strangers.