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The Council has accumulated a good deal of paper that never quite existed: postcards from improbable destinations, trading cards, advertisements, wrappers, notices, handbills, souvenirs, and other printed detritus. Things made for the moment—and therefore, perhaps, worth keeping.

Emily Dickinson entrusted poems to envelopes and scraps. And in Big Sur, Jack Kerouac found something larger in the fate of paper and leaves:

Kerouac looks across an ancient valley and sees everything passing through. The fog flies by,

“dissolving like ephemera”;

the leaves

“come and go, grow and fall.”

Even the discarded paper bags know that they came from wood and will become pulp again, returning to their “sisters the leaves.”

“a mess of leaves suddenly go skittering in the wind and into the creek. . . floating rapidly down the creek towards the sea. . . ‘Oh my God, we’re all being swept away to sea’”
—Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

This is where the Council catches a few of those leaves along the bank :

• THE PERENNIAL SOPHOMORE PRESENTS: The History of Democracy — Picture Card Series
• ALL CARDS ARE CREATED EQUAL:
  —FIVE MORE TRADING CARDS FROM THE HISTORY OF DEMOCRACY SET