All the world's a stage
And all the men and women merely players
They have their exits and their entrances
And one man in his time plays many parts...
So begins the inordinately famous speech from Shakespeare's As You Like It. People change, it tells us. We all do: go through the motions, have our ups and downs, our tragic moments and our comic relief [1]. We folk of the earth have our glory days and our long twilight of the soul. All things remind us of this.
Including the near-forgotten library card catalog.
Once upon a time, there were small, nondescript pieces of card-stock, with carefully typewritten catalog entries to guide you through the vast recesses of the library. No computers, no search engines, no near misses in your results - just thousands of cards in drawers.
And now, what have they become, these moments of order, these representations of our fight against chaos and anarchy, these small out-farmings of our memories on yellowing papers?
Scratch paper.
In a wonderfully melancholy and circle-of-life turn of things, the old catalog cards are now used to jot down the call numbers you find on the library's internet search. Use it once to find a single book in the seemingly-endless sea[2], and then throw it away - where once it would have been your only link to perhaps the Story of Your Dreams. Now this little card is fleeting, forgotten. An instant, nothing more.
Once a stalwart foot solider in the battle for precision and structure, the card is now a discarded scrap of paper on the wind, drifting silently off the stage.
And one day, you, my friends, and I, we too will float away, despite our every effort to stay. Our once useful hands and minds will be no more than an echo of a memory in this world. Our parts played, we exit - et que c'est triste.
xo,
Devo
[1]: "For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?" - Mr. Bennet, Pride and Prejudice
[2] Wouldn't it be gleefully meta if you happened to write down a call number on its very card?
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