We will all be gone some day. That means the books we enjoy will no longer be read by us. Hopefully, another generation will read them. But maybe not. I consider that thought every once a while as I’m reading a story.
“I’m reading this author’s thoughts… long after he’s dead. It’s almost a form of immortality. A shaky immortality, yes, because it depends on the interaction of the living.”
Books are little monuments that the dead leave behind. Not unlike the trunkless legs of stone Percy Shelley’s traveler found in the desert, in the poem “Ozymandias.” The stone was inscribed with the words “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” But the poem then declares that nothing but the lone and level sand stretched away in every direction.
These stories we write, they really aren’t much to leave behind. Authors like Tolkien or Tolstoy or Dickens leave behind monuments similar to the Sphinx or the Taj Mahal, but even those do not merit much attention from most people. They are slowly forgotten.
As the years pass, our stories become memories from antique lands. Remembered, then half-forgotten, then truly forgotten.
Like ourselves.