01 Oct What We Keep, What We Borrow
There is a French phrase, bibliothèque intérieure, describing the inner library each of us carries through life. It is more than what we remember. Its shelves hold what we have read and heard and lived, and what we have gathered from the people we have known. Over the years, they fill with stories that change what we believe is possible, memories worn soft from returning to them, words we can still hear in someone else’s voice, things we learn along the way and things we never meant to learn at all.
A lifetime of keeping.
We don’t entirely choose what stays. Why three lines of a song remain when we’ve forgotten the rest. Why the smell of a house we haven’t entered since childhood can return us there in an instant. Why a phrase someone used years ago eventually finds its way into our own mouths.
Libraries, of course, are also places for borrowing. And we do that with one another all the time. Some of what passes between us eventually finds a place on our shelves: someone’s confidence in us, a story that changes how we understand where we’ve been, hope when we are short on our own.
But ours is only one library.
I like thinking about all the other little inner libraries around us, carried by people whose lives have crossed our own. We may not be able to see their shelves or know what has found a place there. Maybe it is a compliment they can still repeat word for word. A story of ours they have since told someone else. The memory of being noticed at a moment when they felt invisible. A small kindness from a day we didn’t know was difficult.
Something we barely remember giving may have been returned to so many times that its edges are worn.
It’s a nice thought. Somewhere, on a shelf in someone else’s inner library, something of yours may be tucked among the things they have kept close.