"If I live to be to be old..."

I just finished reading two books that go hand in hand with each other.  84 , Charing Cross Road and Q's Legacy, both by Helene Hanff and they really encapsulate the life of a struggling writer trying to find identity as a person.  She couldn't make it as a student.   She had to drop out of school but her love for literature found her scouring the library looking for a writer that was easily understandable but still "the best".  That  ended up being Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, M.A., King Edward VII Professor of English Literature (henceforth referred to as Q) in the University of Cambridge and he wrote a book called On The Art of Writing.  She checked it out and found it so compelling that she proceeded to get his other writings.  Thus she became a student of his teaching via his writing.

Helene loved to write and looked for jobs doing that.  She wrote for TV but she continued to read.  As time passed her collection of Q's books (and others) grew.  A source for getting her books was a small book store in London called Marks & Co.  Over twenty years of correspondence via letter she built a relationship with people she never met by buying books and at times just being a nice person. 

Out of that correspondence came 84, Charing Cross Road.   It's a book full of letters.  The book was very successful and actually was consdered a "cult" book.  That is to say it had a cult follwoing.    Hanff became so popular that eventually when Marks & Co got torn down she was given the bookstore sign.  She got thousands of letters over the years,gifts, phone calls, and was able to go to England.  Anyone looking on would say she was a success and quite frankly, they would be right.  She even got a marker on the site of the Charing Cross Road Bookstore where all the correspondence had taken place.  But in the long range scheme of things was she really?  The TV show, the plays, the fans, the trips, the books, and all the stuff she acquired over the years. All those things.  In the end though what was it for?  The books she acquired ended up sitting on a bookshelf accumulating dust and while there was a metal plaque made after her book was published at the site where all the events of the book took place it wasn't until after the store had closed and been torn down. That said, one must ask what kind of a mark we want to leave.  Will it be one that will stand the test of time or will people just look at the mark we leave as a memoir that they shelve with the other trinkets they collect?  Something to think about.