Short Stories and Drabbles

The Center of the Library

"The Library," my father told me that time many years ago, though day and year are both derivatives of time and thus are hardly applicable to the situation here and are only used for the reader's ease of understanding "is vastly vast and spirallingly endless through all of existence, just rooms upon rooms, and librarians in all." I watched him as he sat with the book open on his lap, his frail hands hiding the scrawled letters from where I stood, he coveted those letters as though they were written in gold. I tore my eyes from the paper and back to my father, who was so pale and fragile now I might have mistaken him for paper, were he not speaking aloud "what book do you suppose you'll read?"

"What do you mean 'what book'?" I simply grow irritated when he asks such questions of me "I'll read as many as I can possibly fit into my life" I raise my arms to the vast room around me and he shakes his head.

"That is why I ask which one, by the time you have finished your first then your time will be over, you may not age now, but you gain a year for every page you will turn" he sighed, turning to the next page of his own book, there were only a few left now.

"Then I shall go and find the best book in the library, and I shall read that," I left the chamber, I wouldn't find my book there anyway, I was sure it was somewhere else. Buried amongst the many other identical covers, perhaps already being read by another librarian in some far off hexagon.

No room that I entered over the next decade, though once again decade, being a time word, has no real application, seemed to pull at me the way I imagined it must. My feet carried me endlessly from chamber to chamber, my fingers brushing across spines of silk and leather as breeze hushed its way through the shaft in the center, making me imagine occasionally that it came from somewhere beyond the chambers that ought, really, to just be stuffy, still and musty. When I came across them sitting in their corners, I would speak to the other librarians, all with their dull clothing and lined faces but glowing eyes, they all spoke of the same things in the same tones as my father had so long ago; Golden ink in spiralling handwriting, written by who I wondered, leading them word by word through odd narratives that sometimes meant nothing at all, heavy pages that sometimes were difficult to turn yielding secrets that none would share with me.

Once or twice, like dreaming, I would feel a tug and open a book on the nearest shelf, I later found the name of this tug on one of the pages, Curiosity, But I never was able to read more than a page before finding myself confused and agitated. This was foolish, I could always assure myself, surely if it meant for me to read it the letters would not swim before my eyes the way they did.

The philosophy had always seemed sound to me as I walked ever onwards, If I'm meant to read through the whole book then it will make sense. There was only one librarian I met who ever made me think otherwise, he sat in hexagon in circuit 15-94, the creases in his stony face seemed to crack and split as he lifted his head to look at me. There is little I had seen in the library that could have compared to this librarian, his eyes no longer glowed like the others, his hands wavered over the page of his book "ah, young one," he spoke hardly above a whisper but, oh how it filled the room "you haven't chosen a book yet?"

"No, I haven't, I haven't found any that draws me in" I admit, looking around at all the identical shelves and spines, where was the last hexagon I'd felt a tug in, it must be so far from here.

The man simply shook his head "then you may well have walked past it, you won't know your book until you read it, you just have to pick one" he sighed "though you may be searching the wrong level too, perhaps you want the round room" seeing the confusion on my face he continued, ushering me to sit down "it has been a whisper amongst the librarians, they've seen the words in their books and told it to passersby, a hexagon that is not, it is just one continuous wall with only a single shelf with a single book, whose spine goes all the way around"

"What does that mean, how do I find such a room?" I knelt in front of him, He merely shook his head and looked back down at the book resting open on his lap, its ink didn't look dull to me, though, neither did it didn't shine the way I imagined.

"only a whisper, Young one, any librarian with a bit of sense\ knows no such room can exist, a room with only one wall, could you believe such a thing? Nay, it can't exist" his breath came hollow as he laughed. He tried turning the page again, but his hands shook so that he couldn't lift the corner "do help me won't you, young one?" I reached carefully to flip the thick, yellowed paper over.

I sat in quiet contemplation of his words as he read on, some part of me, deep in the core of my brain, agreed with him. How would such a room fit into the library, where every hexagon locked together. With only one wall, where would the door be? And what of the round book. I sat imagining it, were it's spine a ring top to bottom, there'd be no way to turn the page, inwards or outwards, it would simply be too inflexible, but were it's spine a ring, side to side, there would be no first page to start at, and no last page to end it, I salivate at the thought of all the knowledge that could be in such a book, with such impossibly infinite-seeming pages, and perhaps if I never reached the end of the book, I could never run out of time, though I might grow very bored of that with no time to pass or kill.

I am hardly through these thoughts of mine when the librarian in front of me reaches the very last letter of the four hundred and tenth page of his book, letting it rest on his lap as he leaned back, the air between us became ever still and I knew that I was alone. In the feeble and inadequate light cast by the globes that grew from the wall the man looked unnervingly like my father, though I was a good many leagues from the hexagon where he had settled to read, I wondered if another librarian had come across him before he finished the last few pages of his book. Gently as I can, I take the man and push his body into the shaft at the center, his book clutched to my chest to be put back on the shelf. I pause. I think I should simply pick a book, rather than search for the impossible room. Quietly I take my seat and open to a random page of the book the man left behind, finding, halfway down, seven simple words "I Live, I die, I am gone".

The chosen text for this response was Jorge Luis Borges' "The Library of Babel" (Spanish: La Biblioteca de Babel) published in 1941, and interacts with the text on several levels, the most blatant being that the narrative of the response takes place entirely within the Library of Babel itself as the character, much like the narrator from the original, wanders from hexagon to hexagon, on a deeper level the texts both reflect on the human desire to understand, the original text acting as a thought experiment by Borges to try and simplify the universe into a more present and familiar form, becoming the library that contains every conceivable combination of letters. In the initial stages of planning this response I tried to find the number of books required for all those combinations, and therefore judge the size of the Library, but in every discussion it seemed to be agreed that the Universe, like our own, is almost unfathomably enormous, this led to wondering what it would be like to explore it. As stated by the narrator, there are speculated catalogs of the library somewhere, and the task becomes finding that specific book, similar to how many people spend their entire lives searching for their answers to what they should be doing, rather than picking something and using their life to do it, this became the focus of my response, reflecting the vastness of the library into the uncertainty of someone trying to navigate their own adulthood.

One particular feature of the original text that stuck out to me on any particular read through were the religious reflections, discussing how the archangels' own diaries could be found there and the Mystics' claims of a found camber with only the one circular book in it struck me as a reference to "Dante's Paradiso" where the final sphere of paradise/heaven, God itself, is described as a ring of light containing all the world's knowledge. Such a book in such a place would likely be inconceivable, the way Dante cannot see God, only the light, because his mortal brain cannot conceive what its appearance would be, and the way that we in life cannot understand everything around us, thus I made the decision for the character to settle I the end for understanding a much smaller fragment of the universe, and learning a much smaller truth, the phrase "I live, I die, I am gone" that is stated at the end of the story, reflecting on how the only certainty of our existence is our death, can actually be found in the Library itself in "drr,lrd,fk.dlagvhcc" on page 372, located volume 6, of shelf 4, on wall 3, right where the character meets the Old Man.

The whole task, and studying the text, has caused me to pause several times and rethink my own choices of where I am going and which "book" I will end up choosing in my life.