The Big Book of

humanity. I’ve been studying a lot lately, and one of my favorite textbooks is humanity. Pages and pages of text are flung at me daily, from all directions: the subway crazy, the lovers lost in their interlocked hands, the emotional shopper, and children with no social filter are all pages in the big book of humanity.

But what of the book itself? I think there are a lot of people who would imagine that the big book of humanity is gilded and under glass somewhere, being viewed by a stream of reverent onlookers, forever preserved for future generations to gaze at in awe. To be sure, it seems to me that this is the most common view currently circulating among the human element of the planet. And it’s true, to some extent. Humanity ought to be held in reverence, if only because the gift of an emotional spectrum and the gift of ambulation afford us constantly new and almost inconceivable experiences.

Movement—the movement that occurs along the emotional spectrum and the movement that occurs in the physical plane—makes me think of the big book of humanity as a little more careworn. When I visualize it, the first thing I see is a paperback book with a cover that has been torn a little bit in the corner, folded at another, and dimpled as if it had been shot with a BB gun. My book is a pirated copy I picked up from other people and their notes are in the margins, their bookmarks are strewn about the inside, and their hand turned down corners where particularly moving passages could be found. How I came into possession of it remains a mystery, but it is one of my dearest possessions.

Some of the pages fall out, you know. Some fall, and as I reach to recollect them, I read over them and am reminded of history, of emotions I once felt, and of the people I have learned from. (Yes, that is a dangling preposition, but in the book of humanity the grammar rules are suspended in the interest of individual expression.) Some fall and get lost in the river of life my skiff is floating on, never to be seen again—and there is page after page of highly uninteresting material…it isn’t all fascinating…and some of it can be dismissed without a further thought. Laundry day is a good example. All, or at least most, of the pages involved in collecting all the dirty clothes you have, throwing them into a pile, going to the Laundromat (or the laundry room) and running the washer are fairly unimportant—no offense to people who love their laundry rituals. Those pages can be largely dismissed, but the page where a person is introduced into the story that is five foot tall, portly, and elbowing you in the solar plexus to get at the next dryer is nearly indispensable because the big book of humanity is about (duh!) people.

I don’t know how it is with most people, but I do not read about most of the people I care about every day. Sorry, I just calls ‘em like I sees ‘em, and I don’t see a lot of the people I care about every day, so I don’t read about them. I’m reminded when one of their pages falls into my lap to call them and recall all they’ve done for me because I do genuinely care for them and love them (and would do anything for them), but I don’t read about them daily.

The human condition is, at its most basic: survive and reproduce. These are the two processes that are hardwired into us. Thus, the two most common characters in the book are the self and the significant other. Significantly passionate pages are almost supple, as if the pages are freshly pressed. Others are stained with tears or sweat or blood. What is most important to me, however, is that they are consecutive and consistently stimulating. I read of her daily, and she teaches me something in the smallest of her movements.

And then sometimes I look down as I’m reading and see the ink is still wet. So I step back and I suddenly feel the weight of a pen in my hand. Don’t get me wrong: we are not the authors of our own books because of most of what’s written therein is plagiarized; however, what we glean from people is ours, like notes in the margin.

And every once in a great while an original idea crops up from nowhere, and that’s what the blank pages at the back of the book are for.