I just watched a live Sotheby’s auction in HD on my phone. Up on the block was a collection of letters and artifacts from the family of Alexander Hamilton. One particular item was a small coil of his hair, cut from his head after he died, then kept in a tiny round case like a makeup compact. It was auburn and gray. It sold for thirty thousand dollars.

When I tuned into the live stream, a letter from his sister-in-law Angelica was up for sale, climbing to a final price of fifty thousand dollars. I wondered what he might have thought, had he known as he put his quill to paper more than two hundred years ago, that these pages that he filled with his perfect script, would in the unimaginably distant future, be purchased for sums that would have erased all of his debts, and given his children a comfortable life. Humans, we are strange creatures.