"and this, they say, and this, and this"

St. John's College

      "Our imaginations decay.  We decay.  Even books decay.  And we are all, finally, forgotten.  Yet at some point in the future, some other reader will wrestle with this passage in this very [1651] copy of Leviathan.  And I will be embedded within its memory, a spectral visitor, a transitory spirit.  I am a volume in its library. . . .
     "Our stacks of books are not individuated, atomic souls.  They are, rather, the whisperings of life lived reflectively.  Their story is not one of erasure, but of accretion—and this, they say, and this, and this. . . ."

     Pano Kanelos, "The book’s the thing," The Hedgehog review:  critical reflections on contemporary culture 22, no. 1 (Spring 2020):  10 (8-10), underscoring mine.