Tiny Echoes in the Universe

Is this a phenomenon that happens to everyone or just me? That thing that happens when you first learn a new piece of information and suddenly you hear it mentioned three more times the same week. Or you randomly happen on a word you didn't know the definition to and then your best friend uses it in a sentence the next day. It seems like sometimes we will ideas and information into life, or at least our own lives. And of course the argument can be made that because this information is new to us we are hyper aware of any mention of it, which would otherwise still exist but go unnoticed if we had never looked up that definition or stumbled upon that Wikipedia page 15 clicks deep. But somehow....I don't think that's true. 

What brought this train of thought to my mind? Last night I was taking a bath and reading a library book. And I remembered a funny conversation I had once had with a good friend in which she explained how she hates the idea of sharing a book with untold numbers of strangers. Her reasoning made sense; people sneeze, cough, spill, and do all sorts of unpleasant and unhygienic things around and with the book they happen to be reading. And to her, the thought of those multitudes of germs was too much to take. And so she buys her books. I love buying books, don't get me wrong. But there is something about a library that is completely enchanting. They stand still in a fast moving world. A quiet sanctuary of trees when the originals are too far away. You can't even get people to be quiet in a movie theater, but everyone is hushed in a library.

And I was thinking last night that it's so appropriate somehow that libraries came into being and continue to exist. Because if there is one thing that is communal, that is shared above anything else it has to be language. It seems so right that the words I'm reading, the exact same words, have been read before and will be read again by different people, in different homes, on different couches, and in different bathtubs. It somehow turns a solitary pleasure into a shared experience amongst strangers you will most likely never meet. But how wonderful that you are connected anyway, in one tiny and intangible way. 

And to bring me back to the beginning, how fitting that this picture was on Humans of New York today. 

"I’m doing my dissertation on medieval literature. I feel a sense of wonder and awe whenever I study old manuscripts. It’s like I’m holding communion with readers from centuries ago. You don’t really get that from a Kindle."