The Library Book

by Susan Orlean

I found myself wondering whether a shared

memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it. Is the circuit broken, the memory darkened?

My mother was the one person besides me who knew what those gauzy afternoons had been like. I knew I was writing this because I was trying hard to preserve those afternoons. I convinced myself that committing them to a page meant the...

The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten—that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world,...

for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts, nothing matters. It means that everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a wild, random, baffling occurrence, a sca...

or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose—a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book,...

In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or ...

Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived.

It is something that no one else can entirely share, one that burns down and disappears when

we die. But if you can take something from that internal collection and share it—with one person or with the larger world, on the page or in a sto...

and