Found in a Book

This is just a little something, found in the battered little leather bound volume of Hume's Essays I purchase down the road. Parsing what I could, and accepting that this little slip may in fact have had no better connection to the volume than any other place-mark, I like to think that the undated book may once have been of sufficient import to its owner as to have been insured as part of a parcel. Possible, yes? The book itself is small, and was probably never so very expensive as to warrant insurance of itself, so I prefer to think of it as part of a larger, though still portable library, sent after someone from my own home state out here to what was at the period most likely still just the West and not yet the state of Washington.

It's a lovely thought, isn't it?

The wear to the covers and the tears on the spine, while making the book worth no more than the four dollars and fifty cents I spent for it, also suggest a devoted yet respectful reader, or rather a whole history of them between its original and its present possessor. There are indications throughout the text that the ribbon has rested between more pages than just the ones where I found it. Two or three very delicate annotations, all in pencil and quite discreet, not however in the same hand, likewise indicate multiple owners. That the book has survived even in the shape it is in for what may well be more than one hundred years, tells me first that "The New Universal Library" of which this is one volume from E. P. Dutton & Co. was meant to last, and secondly that the Essays of David Hume were assumed likewise to be required by future generations. I like the confidence expressed by both assumptions and the fact that it has been justified, if only by me.

As for the little coupon from the Insurance Company of the State of Pennsylvania, as it stipulates to both "Automobile" and "Horse & Wagon Floaters," whatever that may mean, as being on offer, I like to think my own grandmother may well have been a client of the company as well whoever dropped this slip into the book. My grandma was almost exactly six months old the day the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, and lived to see the Space Shuttle circle the planet. I suspect the Insurance Company of the State of Pennsylvania, as such, is probably now something less than the memory of my grandma is to me. Yet this scrap of paper, slipped in a book, testifies, however inarticulately, to the fact of that company's existence, much as the photograph of my grandparents dancing that I keep in my office reminds me of where I came from.

It is, as I've recently discovered in reading so many ghost stories, less the connections to our past that are familiar or that can be proved than the suggestion of connections previously unsuspected or hitherto unnoticed that remind us to attend to whatever presence the dead reveal to the living. True, reading ghost stories has also reminded me that to make too much of minor coincidence; the recurrence of a name, the reminder of a past home, the change in a familiar photograph when studied again for the first time in who knows how long, to see in such things signs of anything, is more symptomatic of, in the kindest construction, a fallacious, even dangerous self reflection rather than any visitation of spirits either benevolent or otherwise. Still, as I'm very much in the mood for ghosts, let me just quote briefly from the passage in Hume's Essay X, Of Superstition and Enthusiasm, where I found the insurance slip:

"Every thing mortal and perishable vanishes as unworthy of attention; and a full range is given to the fancy in the invisible regions, or world of Spirits, where the soul is at liberty to indulge itself in every imagination, which best suits its present taste and disposition."

So if my grandmother, or some previous owner of this little book, or even the presumably defunct Insurance Company of the State of Pennsylvania meant to communicate nothing to me tonight, even if they could, clearly David Hume at least would seem to be suggesting it was a good thing I picked up his book to read with my supper rather than the Algernon Blackwood stories I'd intended to read, but somehow could not find in the stack by my bed, though right there it was when I looked again just now.

Clearly, I had more need of more rational companionship than I had tonight of ghosts.

Thank you, Mr. Hume, wherever you are.