With each table, with each wall and floor, with each set of bookcases built and filled so the shelves are heavy with books, comes the knowledge that all of it will fall apart someday. In our lifetimes, or after, these walls and floors and shelves will no longer do their jobs. The wood will splinter, rot, maybe get used for firewood, maybe get traded for some new model or discarded at the dump, scrap wood, sawdust, dead. This is their fate, and ours, as use and time enact their wearing.
