On the 14th August I trav­elled from Cardiff to Lon­don on the first leg of my jour­ney to Dijon. Once in Lon­don I mis­laid a book of mine: The Red Queen: Sex and the Evo­lu­tion of Human Nature by Matt Rid­ley — one of the most enthralling pieces of non-fiction I’ve read in a long time. I prob­a­bly left this book on the coach I trav­elled on dur­ing the short jour­ney between the two cities.

But why am I writ­ing this now?

After read­ing about Mike Mitchell’s recently received, unex­pected and improb­a­ble par­cel, I am a renewed believer in the phil­an­thropic mind, and am now hop­ing that the per­son who even­tu­ally found my book didn’t hand it to Lost Prop­erty because they’re read­ing The Red Queen before attempt­ing to find the orig­i­nal owner.

Well that ‘orig­i­nal owner’ is me, and I hope you enjoyed the book. (I can hope, right?)

But why? It’s not about los­ing a mate­r­ial pos­ses­sion or the fact that I only had two chap­ters left to read. It’s that through­out the pages of the book were my notes: those pro­found quotes, the con­cepts I wanted to study fur­ther, the words or sen­tences I wanted to copy down: they’re gone now. Gone until I read the book again. That is why I hope it finds its way back to me.

Of course, it will also pain me ever-so-slightly to re-purchase an already read book instead of a new, undis­cov­ered one. How­ever, as Woo Lai Wah said to Mike Mitchell, “unfor­tu­nately, ascend­ing spir­i­tu­al­ity is expensive”.

via clus­ter­flock and Kot­tke