Today I read a whole book at Barnes and Noble. It was a book of all of these random love letters. Some were touching, some were disturbing, some happy, some sad. The letters themselves were moving, but even more moving than the letters were the stories before and beyond the letters.
Let me explain: The letters and e-mails and blogs and notes were all photocopied and put into the book. Similar to the Post Secret books. There is something amazing in seeing the paper somebody used or their penmanship or the color of ink that they chose. At the end of the book there were a couple of pages of sentences, maybe a paragraph about the people who wroth the letters. And to also know what happened leading up to the letter, to read what happened after the letter was received, that is moving. To know that the man who wrote a letter with a blue pen on unlined paper with all the folds (like it had been carried in a pocket) with the small and long cursive words about how happy he was to have a son. How much he loved his wife and would alway love her. To know that this man had been killed before he got to even see his son. That's gripping. Beyond that it is crazy to know that this man's choice to write his wife a letter goes beyond him, his wife, his son, his family and friends. It affected me. What if I can affect somebody the way he has affected me? What if you can? Whether we believe it or not, we impact things in a way we will never be able to understand.
To end...I wonder if the person who buys the book will ever know that someone has already flipped every page and read through the whole thing...I wonder if I have ever bought a "new" book that somebody has already read.
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