At Night, Here In The Library, The

I Remember, As A Child, The Confusion Of Not Knowing What This Place Was Where I Was Supposed To Spend The Night: It's A Disquieting Experience For A Child. And What I Would Do Was Quickly Unpack My Books And Go Back To A Book I Knew Well And Make Sure The Same Text And The Same Illustrations Were There.

To Say That An Author Is A Reader Or A Reader An Author, To See A Book As A Human Being Or A Human Being A Book, To Describe The World As Text Or A Text As The World, Are Ways Of Naming The Readers Craft.

I Know That Something Dies When I Give Up My Books, And That My Memory Keeps Going Back To Them With Mournful Nostalgia.

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.

I Like To Imagine That, On The Day After My Last, My Library And I Will Crumble Together, So That Even When I Am No More I'll Still Be With My Books.