Shelved Souls
A Meditative Reflection On If Lives Were Books
I first had this thought in a cemetery.
I was walking through rows of headstones reading about people I had never personally known, but was connecting with in that moment. The year they were born, the year they died, who they loved, who they left behind. I itched at the familiar feeling but couldn’t quite place it, then finally realized: walking through a cemetery reminded me of walking through a library.
Being in a cemetery is like being surrounded by books, full of intersecting stories and lives; adventures, languages, tragedies, histories, and dreams.
From that moment of simile I have mulled it over in my brain constantly. It feels like a new philosophy. It resonates with me. In some ways it has become a religion for me, and here’s why.
A Thought To A Philosophy
My personal perspective about what happens after death is that there is nothingness. I find comfort in it and motivation to be intentional in how I act now, how I decide what to do, and how to treat people. I know I don’t get a do over and so I will do the best that I can in this life that I have.
However, nothingness is intangible, hard to place and hard to hold onto. Thinking about lives as books provides an enchanting, concreteness to existence.
It is often difficult to imagine the impact of an individual life.
As of Tuesday, April 2, 2024, there were 8.1 billion people on this planet. That is a lot of lives. When I personally think of what I could possibly do to impact any minute fraction of humans within that 8.1 billion population, it feels daunting and hopeless.
How could my small quiet life make any sort of difference?
But when I relate my life to a book, I am instantly convinced that my life can and does and will make an impact.
Hear me out.
Imagine every single 8.1 billion lives but as books. Then apply a basic level of information architecture to the problem, and we now have a system of connection and impact.
Libraries are intricately organized. There is a reason librarians need a master’s degree to do their job. The levels of categories and intersecting categories are almost endless. For the sake of this thought practice, we will stay focused on two basic categorizations: Genre and Author.
Say you have a specific book in mind. You walk into the library and you start by finding the section related to the genre. Next, because the shelves are alphabetized by author, you find the pertaining row, and in a matter of minutes, or seconds, you find your book.
That book exists somewhere hyper specific. That is how people find a book intentionally but also how people find a book by chance. Because there are other books, other lives, near the the ones we are already in contact with.
A book can be a best seller. It can be curated and marketed extensively, read and taught around the world, and translated into new languages. It can have a wide impact.
But a book can also be small, picked up in a used bookstore and become a cherished treasure to a special few.
The impact is still an impact. However wide, or however small.
A Meditative Moment
Take a look at your bookshelf. Consider all those books as possible lives. Lives you’ve barely interacted with. Lives you are close to and cherish.
Now place yourself in the most expansive book space you’ve ever been in. Maybe your downtown library branch, or a bookstore you traveled to. Perhaps an imaginary one, like when Belle is shown the library in the Beast’s castle. Or the libraries in Minas Tirith set in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Or one of my favorite fictional libraries, The Cemetery of Lost Books in The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.
Think about the Library of Congress, with 39 million books. Imagine walking through those doors and seeing rows and rows of books known and unknown.
Imagine walking into the al-Qarawiyyin library in Morocco, the oldest library in the world. If you were to touch those spines can you imagine the life hunched over writing those words by hand?
Now think about one book from any of these shelves. Remember the stories it told. The numerous characters, lessons, and journeys; dreams and deaths.
Hold that book in your mind for just a moment.
Now imagine your life. Imagine your stories small and large and place them on paper, in ink, set in a spine. If you could choose, would you be paperback or hardcover? Think of the cover design. Is it bright and bold, or subtle and minimal? Do you select a sans-serif font: crisp and direct. Or a serif from a bygone era: eloquent, swirling, meandering. What language are you written in? What world do you reside?
Now, close your cover and place it on a shelf in the largest, most beautiful, awe inspiring collection of books.
And step away. Let it live. See who picks it up. See who puts it back. See who ignores it. See who returns to it over and over again.
Isn’t it lovely? Your life, your existence, your legacy as a book?
Consider the type of life you want to live; the type of book you leave behind.
Do you resonate with this idea? If your life was a book, share your thoughts in the comments. ❤
