I read every issue of “Viking,” the magazine of the Sons of Norway fraternal organization, of which I’ve been a humble member for longer than I care to contemplate. Often it contains interesting articles. Occasionally there’s even a picture of me, standing on the edge of some SON lodge activity, oblivious. And sometimes it gives me reason to laugh – though rarely on purpose.

The current, October, issue of “Viking” gave me a chuckle. Its cover article is called “Norway’s Secret Library,” and it describes a project called “The Future Library” (Framtidsbiblioteket) in Oslo.

The whole operation is complex and grandiose, but I’ll try to get the gist of it down here – if I can grasp it myself. It started with a Scottish artist named Katie Paterson. She came up with the idea for a library that would contain books by prominent writers that neither she nor anybody alive would ever live to read… for some reason.

A grove of 1,000 spruce trees were planted in a forest in Oslo in 2014. In 2114, those trees will be cut down and turned into paper, on which will be printed books written specially for the project by famous contemporary authors who participate by invitation. (Margaret Atwood got the first invitation. Imagine my surprise.) The Future Library itself has (if I understand the article correctly) been built from the trees initially felled to clear the area for this project. And I guess the building is going to just sit there for the next century, waiting like a time capsule.

You realize what’s happening here, don’t you? Mortality is catching up with my generation. Boomers. And they’re remembering how they treated the authors of the past. How they called for all the classics to be thrown out and burned, to make way for the Now, the With It, the Relevant. (“Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!”)

And they’re terrified future generations will treat them the way they treated the classics.

So they’re building themselves a pyramid. “I am Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works ye mighty, and despair.” (Shelley wrote that, as you’ll know if you were educated before the Revolution.)

If these authors truly believed they’d produced literature for the ages, they’d trust posterity to recognize their achievement.

The Victorians admired Lord Bulwyer-Lytton, and considered Arthur Conan Doyle an insignificant scribbler of low-brow popular fiction. Today we laugh at Bulwer-Lytton, and scholarly works are devoted to Doyle.

That’s what I’m counting on for my own books. Posthumous posterity.

Or maybe a certificate of completion in Heaven.