A woman sits alone in the old library. This old library creaks and when the wind blows readers swear the walls respond with sway, what readers there are.
Few readers attend the library so it also echoes. The door closes behind the woman. Her movements step down the main hall which grows small the longer she listens. In the far wall light drops from the small high windows. This is her final day in the library.
The woman’s problem is that she’s come to the library with only the memory of words, words she believes express everything required to know. The need is pressing. Long ago she heard rumors on the street and in the classroom, suggestions from the wise, references to authors long forgotten, so she can’t ask for assistance from the librarians.
Her problem is like the problem some people have with music. A long time ago they heard a beautiful song; they have a sense of the melody but can’t hum it out loud; perhaps they have two or three bars, perhaps a few notes, but as the title and players escapes them, all they carry is the echo of a melody and thus have no chance of requesting the song or finding it, as some things, some objects and ideas, are impossible to describe such that they refer to something specific in the mind of another.
For half a century she’s come to the library. She’d begun her search in the basement with its naked marble floors and steel shelves with the first book and the closest shelf within reach and from there went book to book, day to day, year to year for half a century. She sought indirect mentions, rumors and footnotes, the long lists at the back, some mention of ideas she had no ability to write herself, as she had no idea how they might be expressed and couldn’t ask.
The reading went slowly at first. But her skills grew day to day. She learned to read German, French, Italian, and English, those languages where the mysteries she sought had the highest probability of finding their way onto the printed page and since, paradoxically, what she sought was independent of language but must be expressed through it, she could skip through none of them, reading through even the indexes, the encyclopedias, and those folios of the obscurest playwrights.
She finished the basement, moved to the first floor. Over the years, the librarians sought her out when faced with questions for which they hadn’t the answer, and the woman would point them to the specific volume, the specific page, and the necessary selection. The parishioners asked, “Where is she?” and her employer finally had to fill her position with someone younger and punctual.
Her problem would not be solved by guesswork or luck but by thoroughness and precise association. One passage, for example, sampled from another, and that from which it sampled was yet another reordering of something she remembered with ease. Her problem was not a problem of bulk but of a comprehensive construction of relationships or, at minimum, a single comprehensible string of words with which she could say, “This is it. Now I can go to a specific work where this idea is treated more fully, and then I shall have the answer.” Or, “This is it; this I can type into the search line and I shall be taken directly to the source.”
The woman read vertically by way of the horizontal. She learned to dismiss the normal questions, such as “Is this one worth my time?” and the librarians cleared her wake of plates and drinking glasses. At night they left certain lights on and provided the woman with a key and access even to those rarest volumes reserved for specialists. One day a scholar came and conversed with the woman and ran from the library in a rush declaring, “Without her, I’d yet be daft. But I’m sorry to say, I myself, with all my knowledge, was of little assistance to her,” and he could be seen chasing down the street in a gray scathing of rain.
One day she happened on a clue and rushed to a lower floor with the excitement of discovery. The next day she came back to the book that had sent her off, shaking her head, and when she finished it, she closed her eyes, her lips moving to rhythmic reiterations.
This is the woman’s final day in the old library, which is as populated as ever with unfilled chairs. Her mind is quick and her mind is empty. The rumors have drifted away and the footnotes have become thousands out of thousands. For the past several years each book she’s read was the book she’d read the day before, the words merely posed in different patterns, every narrative every narrative, every point every point. She looked up; the floors above her rose into dimming light.
One of the younger, braver librarians comes and sits nearby. She asks the woman a question. The woman says, “I can’t remember. But I know that this my last day in the library.”
