reflections on a chocolate wrapper
last week i was in montrose, colorado, for a day on business. i got into town a couple hours early, and decided to pick up a new book, having recently finished the book i had been reading. i went to a used book store - probably the only one in the small town - and wandered through the cramped shelves. most of the books were paperback romance or western or sci-fi novels, but i managed to find a small section that i assumed was devoted to "literature." i came across a paperback of "the razor's edge" by w. somerset maugham. this caught my interest immediately because i had never read the book, yet maugham's "of human bondage" is one of my all-time favorites. so, i handed over eight quarters to the couple behind the counter and spent the next couple hours reading my new (used) book.
when i first opened it i noticed small pieces of paper inside. they appeared to be chocolate wrappers, labeled in french. as i flipped the pages i came across many such bits of paper, and i collected them in a little pile on the table where i sat. when i had finally removed all of them, i looked at the small pile and wondered where they came from. had they fallen into the book and been left there? were they placed in the book on purpose? perhaps the former owner of the book had used the scraps of paper to mark favorite portions of the book. or maybe the scraps of paper were important; maybe they were a memento from a trip to france, placed in a book to be pressed flat and for safe keeping. these little bits of paper, which i had so quickly and cavalierly disregarded and pushed aside, could be clues to a part of someone else's life. i can almost picture an old woman, sitting in her favorite chair, placing these mementos of an exotic chocolate she enjoyed on a wonderful trip abroad into this book, preserving not only the memories of the trip, but also the parts of the book that moved her. and yet in one act of carelessness i destroyed any hope of ever discerning what purpose might have been behind her actions. that information is lost now, forever. maybe it was just meaningless garbage that fell into the pages of an open book, with no guiding purpose or symbolic relevance. however, what the chocolate wrappers represented does not matter now. what matters is that they are gone, and the information they carried by their placements in the book - whether intentional or otherwise - is lost forever. that is what matters, and i have only myself to blame.
but perhaps their purpose is not lost. by treating the wrappers as i did, and realizing the possible implications afterwards, i have thought about the significance of seemingly trivial aspects of daily life that are so often ignored or missed in the rush of modern existence. perhaps the wrappers were there to be brushed aside and discarded, and thus to cause these moments of reflection.
or, maybe they were just garbage that fell into a book.
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10-05-2005, 12:50 AM
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