Legacy.

Man’s fear of dying, he once said, is that there will not be a single story told or written in his name.

I found his books in the empty well beside the road, the pages and paperback covers wet with mold. Radley had made sure to scatter the ashes of his former life where they might have been of use to someone, somewhere, perhaps someday in the distant future. He was not one to press his ideas upon the minds of others, even one so supple, so loyal as my own. Burning them, pitching them somewhere the wolves could play with them would have been wasteful.

Back then I had believed that lie.

Time capsules are man’s way of justifying his own existence. They are boxes of jewelry, love letters, childhood momentos and pictures, things that dated their time and their place as human beings on this earth and things set aside for future generations to come. Men are forgetful creatures. Though every one has his own individual fingerprint, his own strand of DNA, when they are gone and buried they are soon without identity, dust never again to be uncovered or recognized. All things eventually lose their faces. All things fade from memory, leaving only names and dates, and the things set in stone.