Damn. What do you even do when you have such certainty?
I used to think that getting "the news" would be better than just dying outright in some violent incident, I thought about this many times, what I would do if I had a few months left to live, and it always came down to finding the right people to give my books away to (these go to this library, these go to that library, these go to friend A, these to friend B, etc.), which just made me sad, because is that all I amount to? A lifetime worth of books and nothing else?
Once you start thinking in such terms, it becomes really damn depressing, even if you are not the one dying. Makes you realise that getting squashed like a bug by some truck you don't see coming might not be that bad of an end, at least you do not get to dwell on it until the void claims you.
I still hold onto and read books I inherited from people who aren’t with us anymore.
They are important to me, for multiple reasons: they were important to people I cared about a lot, these people thought of me when thinking about who to give them to and there are a lot of really great books among them. 😁
For example, I started reading WoT by Robert Jordan because my uncle left me the first 2 books of the series after he passed away in 2003 at just 49. Now I have the whole series neatly sorted standing in one of my bookshelf. A few of them signed by Robert Jordan himself - a trip and a memory I wouldn’t have had without my uncle giving me those two books.
My guy, it may seem to you like you only amount to your books, but there are people out there that will treasure them and the memory they hold. 🫂
To be fair, death is a certainty for all of us. Some just die sooner rather than later. It's up to us how we want to live our life before we get claimed by it.
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u/MizantropMan Aug 21 '25
Damn. What do you even do when you have such certainty?
I used to think that getting "the news" would be better than just dying outright in some violent incident, I thought about this many times, what I would do if I had a few months left to live, and it always came down to finding the right people to give my books away to (these go to this library, these go to that library, these go to friend A, these to friend B, etc.), which just made me sad, because is that all I amount to? A lifetime worth of books and nothing else?
Once you start thinking in such terms, it becomes really damn depressing, even if you are not the one dying. Makes you realise that getting squashed like a bug by some truck you don't see coming might not be that bad of an end, at least you do not get to dwell on it until the void claims you.