Being a Part of History

I wonder if people just want to leave behind a mark or something of themselves for the future. I wonder if people want to just have been part of something, something larger than themselves, a bit of history in the making.

Maybe we all just want to leave a mark. I kind of already thought that that is what we want, to make a mark, an impression, a marker that we were there, that the world saw us. It’s like a recognition of our life, our work, our hours on this Earth. A small ripple our life left behind, left for all of time, faint, but unmistakably there. Almost like a little part of our self remains long after we are gone, an impression of our hand in the sand.

We all did that, didn’t we? Make footprints in the sand and watch as the ocean washed them away. That is the impermanence of life, but don’t we all kind of want there to be a remnant of our presence? A sign that we were there?

That’s kind of why I love used books, to me, you can’t read a book without leaving some sort of sign: the way you mark a page, the way you bent the book when it lay in your bag, the way the edges are worn from the shelf, or the smell your perfume left when it leaked a little. We leave parts of ourselves behind in our books, our marks, our tear stains. And that’s what I love about used books.