A Shower Thought: Antiquity and Time
/ 2 min read
Molière, Héros ou personnages, François Rabelais, I’m definitely in the French section. In my many months of coming to this library, I have yet to see a single person touch a book on this shelf. How many authors brought life to these words, only for them to be untouched, gathering dust on their crumbling pages? How many authors, past, present, and future, would follow suit, leaving behind a forgotten piece of history in their wake? My procrastination and shower thoughts get the best of me - some napkin math and a Google search later tell me that we would need 450 miles of shelf to hold all the books in the world (since 1440) and 6 more miles for every year to come. To drive along this shelf would be to race through 600 years of written human history. To stop in the middle and peer down both ends would be to halt the relentless march of time, glimpse at a mere 1.2% of forgotten history, and feel all its infinitude in our infinitesimally small car. Time. Take one step and your move through time would be so imperceptibly subtle that running along the shelf would be to race time and all its eternity. A literal race against time. The irony you would feel as the contours of books and shelves, so definitive in their existence, yet so infinite in their creation, seem to perpetually end and begin as they blur past you. As your breathing becomes labored and your feet start to sore, you wonder if the struggle ever ends. No, of course it doesn’t. Time is the endless catalyst whose stride breathes life into all that is and all that will be. Unable to run any longer, your legs come to a halt, and you begin to wonder what era you have stopped in. As you pull out a book at random and begin the read the first page, a realization hits you. How, as puppets to this unstoppable force, is our perception of the world so undeniably definitive?
Math