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I found six volumes of Balzac yesterday at the thrift store. They were published in 1901, one hundred and five years old. I held them in my hands like a treasure chest on the ride home, and I thought about what they'd seen...two world wars, the Great Depression, Eliot's Wasteland, a man on the moon, the end of the Cold War, and the invention of the internet. And still there they were, having traveled through all of their days, toward me. What shall I give them to look at?