Lost and Found

This week during our school's Literary Festival I had the privilege of seeing Davy Rothbart, the creator of Found magazine. This magazine is compiled of lost letters, photos, notes, advertisements, or anything that someone finds and sends in. The reason that I found this magazine so interesting is that every letter or scrap of paper that they find, they deem significant. While other's may think of these letters as trash, to them it is treasure. Oddly enough, this made me think about the books we read in school. The books we read in class are most likely chosen by the teachers because they are of some literary importance. These books are deemed significant by the school, and therefore they are chosen as our class curriculum. But after learning about Found magazine, I began to wonder, what makes these books more important than any other piece of literature? What makes them more significant? In my opinion, the letters published in Found are in some ways more significant than the books we read in class. They are true accounts of human emotion that would be hard to come across in a classroom book. Rather than being edited and scrutinized under a magnifying glass, they are handwritten, rarely edited, and come straight from somebody's deepest thoughts. And in my opinion that makes them almost more interesting and significant than most of the books we read in school. So the next time you come across a piece of paper being shuffled across the floor, pick it up, because you never know what it could say.