Veteran Insomniac

I burned a phonebook today. Not out of emotion, but pragmatism. The room was cold and it’s entirely paper; for lack of real wood I pitched it in the fireplace. Catching the thing alight was a bit tricky, it’s to compressed to hold a flame well, so I tried to open it and lay it spine-up with the pages splayed beneath. That didn’t work to well either. It caught alight, but again everything was too thick to keep burning. Finally I flipped it over, and crumpled the top pages until they sat like a flower on top of the rest of the book. Finally I got a blaze worth something, and the bloom began to self sustain. I watched it, burning there, each page turning black and disappearing into the fire above. Archived information, page by page, disappearing. Names and numbers, consumed into the Æther, dispelled into oblivion. It was so curious, I didn’t notice how hot I’d gotten until a bead of sweat dripped into my eye. Now all that remains is embers and ash, the secrets of this book annihilated. This specific set, rather. All this data is duplicated somewhere, but I can’t help but think of other books, unique volumes of lore, pulled from a consciousness that has met the same incorporeal end as the codices scribed by their unknown authors. In this digital age, where our knowledge exists only in ephemera,  what will we leave for generations to find on our obsolete hardware?  Will they find what we’ve left? Have we gained or lost permanence in this electronic age? I guess we’ll know in time.