Whispering into that next tin can

Sometimes books speak to each other in interesting ways. 

In The Library Book, Susan Orlean's fascinating account of the Los Angeles Central Library fire 0f 1986, she muses on the library as repository of memory:

The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten--that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts, nothing matters. It means that everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a wild, random, baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody. But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose--a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the permanence of memory.

In The Zero, Jess Walter portrays a police officer present when the World Trade Center collapsed, a man who struggles to assemble any permanent memories or coherent narratives of the attack or its aftermath. The novel opens with a scattering of leaves:

They burst into the sky, every bird in creation, angry and agitated, awakened by the same primary thought, erupting in a white feathered cloudburst, anxious and graceful, angling in ever-tightening circles toward the ground, drifting close enough to touch, and then close enough to see that it wasn't a flock of birds at all--it was paper. Burning scraps of paper. All the little birds were paper. Fluttering and circling and growing bigger, falling bits and frantic sheets, some smoking, corners scorched, flaring in the open air until there was nothing left but a fine black edge . . . and then gone, a hole and nothing but the faint memory of smoke. Behind the burning flock came a great wail and a moan as seething black unfurled, the world inside out, birds beating against a roiling sky and in that moment everything that wasn't smoke was paper. And it was beautiful. 

Orlean deals with a burning library, Walter with burning towers, and both with scraps and fragments of charred paper that must be preserved, deciphered, and returned, if possible, to the repository of memory. Both examine mysteries that remain ultimately unresolved, including the mystery of human identity and the relationship between narrative and culture. And even as they commemorate events that destroyed vast amounts of paper (and, in Walter's case, people), they do so by committing more words to paper, whispering once more down that next tin can on a string. For those who care about culture and memory, it's really the least we can do.