Vanish into History
The library has been bored lately. Right now, as we type this, we have Luca playing on Disney+ and wondering what it all means. Not Luca, it's a pretty standard coming of age Pixar monster. No, we are thinking about life, the universe, and everything as a pretty normal dude once said.
How do you wrestle with the idea that you will one day no longer be? Children and works are how most people get along, knowing they will be remembered. But what about the rest of us? Those of us who will have very little behind us. The nameless hoard who will vanish into history like the billions before us.
Happy thoughts on this Friday.
This is pretty normal shit to think about. Existential dread and all that. Plus getting older helps.
When you first thought of your mortality, did you freak out? Sit up all night and contemplate death like a normal five year old? Focus on the bleak ending of your being when your being consists of Legos and Back to the Future?
Makes us think of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the part where whichever one Gary Oldman is playing contemplates the knowledge of death. Shouldn't it have freaked us all the hell out? Grandma chucks it and then, boom, OMG so could we. We could end and cease to be. That one thought should have locked down the little gerbil running the wheel for a month.
But it didn't.
In the play/movie, Oldman theorizes that we inherently know that we will die. The baked-in knowledge of our own demise.
The library believes it is more simple than that: the human mind ignores shit.
One could say that the human mind was made to ignore shit.
Ever walked into a room and forgot why you went there? Ever been driving and spaced out for a minute? Ever lay down at night and hallucinate for up to eight hours while ignoring all input from every sense you have?
The brain is a magical organ made to focus on singular things really well and…
Wait, how come when all the sea monsters in Luca lose their scales and become human they don't freak the fuck out? If the children's librarian went swimming for the first time as an adult and her skin turned to scales the people of Atlantis would hear it.
Anyway, the library will live forever at least until the building is torn down and everyone we once helped dies. Once the library is gone, then the memory of the town will be gone beyond some blogs. Then no one will remember the past and the world will fade into cycles of rebirth until the sun consumes all with its fiery embrace.
And a good time was had by all.