Books are Immortality

As I approach the anniversary of 30 years stumbling around in this earth pretending to know what I'm doing, thoughts about my own mortality come more frequent. Although, I plan to live forever (so far, so good), it's probably time for me to come to grips with it.

Then this showed up on my Facebook newsfeed:

Photo found here
Beautiful... but depressing.

That can really get a person thinking. How many people have come before us that nobody remembers. It's like they cease to exist as soon as the last person who knew about them leaves this life. Then, the cycle continues.

It scares me and it fascinates me.

This is probably a factor in why I love history so much. When you learn about the past, it is keeping the people who came before us alive.

The ancient Egyptians believed that as long as your name is spoken, your soul will exist after death. That is why they carved their names in stone and written in stories everywhere. It helped ensure their names would be spoken for generations and they would continue to live.

"Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead-when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be fore me. Whose death will make me truly dead?"
-Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

What does that have to do with books?

In a century, when I am long gone and anybody whose memory has kept me alive is also gone, I hope my books are somewhere out there, keeping me alive.

I think this is a goal of a lot of authors. We want to touch lives in a way that our words are passed down through the years, keeping a part of us alive.

But I do not want this for my sake. I am not vain enough to hope entire generations know me because I want to be known. No, I want my books to live past me for my characters. I love them so much that I hope they live beyond the time I can give them on this earth.

They are better worth remembering than the lowly author who created them.