History lesson

I'm still raving about Jack Gantos' 2012 Newbery award book "Dead End in Norvelt".  It is a truly unique creation.  Set in 1962 Norvelt, Pennsyvania, 12 year old Jack Gantos is the main character in a plot the inside book jacket genuinely describes as "melding the entirely true and the wildly fictional".  I haven't written a decent poem in weeks, so at Monday night poetry I read them the following excerpt:  Oops...a little background...  Jack has been grounded for the summer and he's only allowed to help feisty old neighbor Miss Volker type obituaries...
     "When the sun goes down each day it turns its back
on the present and steps into the past," she started with
a strong, even voice, "but it is never dead.  History is a
form of nature, like the mountains and sea and sky.  His-
tory began when the universe began with a 'Big Bang,'
which is one reason why most people think history has
to be about a big event like a catastrophe or a moment
of divine creation, but every living soul is a book of
their own history, which sits on the ever-growing shelf
in the library of human memories.  Sadly, we don't
know the history of every person who ever lived, and
unfortunately many books about historic people, like
the lost Greek and Latin and Arabic texts, are gone
forever and are as lost as the lost world of Atlantis.
     "But here in Norvelt we had one of those librarians
who collected the tiniest books of human history.  Mrs.
Hamsby, who died today at age seventy-seven, was the
first postmistress of Norvelt and she saved all the lost
letters, those scraps of history that ended up as 'un-
deliverable' in a quiet corner of Norvelt.  But they were
not 'unwanted'.  Mrs. Hamsby carefully pinned each en-
velope to the wall, so that the rooms of her house were
lined from floor to ceiling with letter upon letter, and
when you arrived for tea it appeared as if the walls
were papered with the overlapping scales of an ancient
fish.  You were always welcome to unpin an envelope
and read the orphaned letter, as if you were browsing
in a library of abandoned histories.
     "Each room has its own motif of stamps, so that the
parlor room is papered with human stamps as if people
such as Lincoln, or Queen Elizabeth, or Joan of Arc had
come to visit.  The bedroom has the stamps of lovely
landscapes you might discover in your dreams, and the
bathroom has stamps with oceans and rivers and rain.
Each stamp is a snapshot of a story, of one thin slice of
history captured like an ant in amber.  There is history
in every blink of an eye, and Mrs. Hamsby knew well
that within the lost letter was the folded soul of the
writer wrapped in the body of the envelope and mailed
into the unknown.  And for this tiny museum of lost
history we citizens of Norvelt thanks her."

pages 259-261, "Dead End in Norvelt" by Jack Gantos, FSG, 2011

Many poets were curious about this book...
skimming through the pages..
perhaps pondering their histories...