As Readers, We Are Seldom Interested In

We Seem To Live A Culture That Doesn't Want Blemishes. The Vision Of Most Beautiful Models... Airbrushed In Order To Be Seen As Perfect, Infects Our Notion Of How Literature Should Be Written.

We Can Roam The Bloated Stacks Of The Library Of Alexandria, Where All Imagination And Knowledge Are Assembled; We Can Recognize In Its Destruction The Warning That All We Gather Will Be Lost, But Also That Much Of It Can Be Collected Again; We Can Learn From Its Splendid Ambition That What Was One Man's Experience Can Become, Through The Alchemy Of Words, The Experience Of All, And How That Experience, Distilled Once Again Into Words, Can Serve Each Singular Reader For Some Secret, Singular Purpose.

If The Library Of Alexandria Was The Emblem Of Our Ambition Of Omniscience, The Web Is The Emblem Of Our Ambition Of Omnipresence; The Library That Contained Everything Has Become The Library That Contains Anything.

It Is In The Translation That The Innocence Lost After The First Reading Is Restored Under Another Guise, Since The Reader Is Once Again Faced With A New Text And Its Attendant Mystery. That Is The Inescapable Paradox Of Translation, And Also Its Wealth.

In The Dark, With The Windows Lit And The Rows Of Books Glittering, The Library Is A Closed Space, A Universe Of Self-serving Rules That Pretend To Replace Or Translate Those Of The Shapeless Universe Beyond.