You think of your life as a library. It’s a big one, maybe not the size of the warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but bigger than the little roadside library your neighbor has set up outside her garage.
On this tiny structure resembling an oversized mailbox is a sign that reads: Take a Book, Leave a Book.
Every time you walk by, you glance through the little glass door. There appears to be a constant turnover, everyone abiding by the friendly compact.
With your library, the fairly good-sized one you believe represents your 70 years of living, there is no exchange. The books that go in and on the shelves are yours. No one can borrow them, take them, or replace them. You keep building shelves, expanding eternally, like something out of Hogwarts, like Hermione’s handbag.
You keep yours because you need to read them over and over. Constantly. Incessantly. Even relentlessly. Some of them are so pored over that the print has become smudged, is even disappearing like novelty ink or lemon juice that you must heat to read. But even if the flame were to fail to reveal any invisible words, you could never hold a match to those pages. Even blank, they are significant, have meaning.
And that’s because the books have been read through so many times that you have memorized many of them. The ones that have become illegible or bear blank pages, have been burned into your brain. And there are volumes and volumes like this. Your memory for the words that have composed your life is capacious. Maybe in that way you rival the Raiders warehouse. But even blurred or blank, the books remain on the shelves, not to be read again, but to remind.
Perhaps you could loan some of them out because you know them so well that even if they never were returned, you would still have the memory of them. At least for as long as you can remember.
You remember how your father lost the ability to recall the books that were the story of his life. His library shrank, even smaller than your neighbor’s little roadside lending library. Until it disappeared.
In a way, what you write, every day, is a lending out of the books that have been written by your 70 years. Or is it that they have written you? Sometimes it seems so.
You are sharing them with invisible readers, and if someone responds to them, comments about them, well, that’s like replacing the book you’ve given away with a book, a page or more at least, you add to your library.
If you could recite the entire catalog of your life right up until the day you die, that would be a good thing. Like Garp, you would wish to remember everything up until the moment that clock chimes closing time, the stacks grow dark, and you carry them with you to wherever it is you will go.
Lanning Lee 