On hand rails and old books…
The outside edge of the railing on a set of wood stairs in the Edmonton river valley, taken by the author while out walking.
You can’t really tell from looking at this photo, but years of people sliding their hands along this wood railing have polished the outside edge so smooth that it feels like polished marble.
I’ve walked this same route countless times. But today, running my hand down that railing for the stability lacking in my pandemic-softened legs, I noticed it for the first time.
Not only was the sensation inherently... “delicious” is the word that comes to mind... it was also curiously and remarkably the most out of place sensation in my experience of walking the river valley trails in my hometown. Everything else around me was rough and “natural,” even the exposed grain and scratchy texture of the rest of the railing. Then out of the blue, this uncanny unexpected smoothness.
As I pondered this discovery, I realized it wasn’t just about the sensation itself, powerful though it was. It was the previously unconscious knowledge that even while I was alone there in that moment, that polished railing connected me to the thousands of people who had walked that trail before me, each carrying away a few cells of dead wood, an unnoticed layer of microscopic edges. It reminded me that I wasn’t really alone. That I’m never really alone.
I’ve noticed this phenomenon before, although never before “out in the wild.” The stairs leading down to the Bruce Peel Special Collections in the University of Alberta Rutherford Library have these beautiful indentations in them from a hundred years of students and scholars walking up and down. I walk those stairs knowing I’m literally walking in the footsteps of Henry Marshall Tory and Alexander Rutherford.
I remember, every time we went on a family trip to the Butchart Gardens on Vancouver Island, stopping to see Porcellino, their bronze statue of a boar, its nose polished to gleaming from everyone rubbing it as they went by, including me.
It’s how the colour is worn off more on the left armrest of my couch downstairs… the best seat for watching movies.
The cumulative effect of a million tiny unnoticed actions… a lesson about material things, and about life.
I think it’s part of why I love physical books so much still, especially old vintage books and ones I find at used bookstores, all marked by the touch of so many of my fellow humans before me. It isn’t just about the words and ideas captured on those pages, which admittedly ebooks do equally brilliantly and arguably much more efficiently. It’s also about the slow and subtle marking of the passage of time on those physical pages, something that ebooks capture not at all. Like the polish on the railing, they are the signs of those who have followed these same paths before me, and an awareness of those yet to come.
Annotations and marginalia. Notes and improvised bookmarks. The stains on cookbooks. Actually, no, those are too obvious.
The extra wear and occasional discolouration in the top right corners of books, from countless fingers turning the pages. The frayed edges of covers. The creases along the spine, inevitable no matter how careful past stewards have been.
It’s the human touch, once removed.
The objects we make as humans pretty much always start out with an intended function… a railing to help us climb a set of stairs… a book to carry a story to a reader. But once set loose upon the world, these things can take on unintended purpose and have unexpected effects, some of which become profoundly more than merely their original function. They remind us of our connections. They become our connections.
They extend our humanity.
Happy reading, and leaving your mark, however small!
– Winston
