Consider Alaska’s southeast strip of land, a modern landmass including Alexander’s Archipelago so vast that if it were overlain on the eastern seaboard of the continental US would have entire states disappear beneath its footprint. My words here exist in utter obscurity. I am not well known for being well known. Consider a single stone, no larger than your thumb, existing on the margin of a short spur of sandy asphalt that leads from a parking lot to an unremarkable Delaware beach, mindlessly kicked off the path into some anonymous mound of windblown sand by a flip-flop wearing child as she recklessly bounds from the car toward the summer sea. The child is at once young, green, and uncaring. There the neglected stone will lay, undisturbed, pretty in its own right among a trillion other stones strewn to equivalent anonymity up and down the shoreline. It is not as if the stone will exist as a stone forever, though, even as its hardbound constitution has rendered it durable. The stone has seen a lot in its tens of millions of years of existence. A mere shadow of its former self you might say, sure, but whereas once it was a boulder big as a house that could squash a car whole, it was helpless when faced with a two mile thick slab of ice coming for it. Finally subsumed in a frozen cocoon, the boulder was transported over tens of thousands of years, then ignominiously abandoned on an anonymous beach in a place come to be known as Delaware. There to be further remodeled and diminished by the unthinking forces of wind, rain, and sea. Fast forward another ten thousand years or more, and it finds its belittled-self disrespected, arrogantly kicked aside by some late-comer organism. That’s what timeworn, abject anonymity feels like.