He is not alone in the library, but it is easy to imagine that he is. The vaulted hall is silent but for his own breaths and occasional scratchings in his notebook, and when he occasionally glances up at the long avenues of bookshelves, he sees no one else. There are machines working, somewhere in the depths of this place, and he is sure that there are other scholars like himself working away somewhere in a reading room like this, but there could be kilometres between them.
This library is a record of everything. Every decision made, every conversation held, every action taken. But not just everything that has happened, but everything that is happening, and everything that will happen. Time is not lateral here. It isn’t anywhere. There is no beginning or end, there is no line from here to there, but there is a great circle, and within it there is a lot of space. In that space can be found this library.
He is recording things that have not yet happened in his perception of time, but will happen. He believes, wrongly, that this knowledge will lend him an advantage back in his own nominal course of events. He thinks that the things etched in ink before his eyes will remain the same no matter his actions, so he can act with consequence for himself. But ink runs.
So when he packs away his notebook, returns his books on the future, and steps out of the doors to this place, he does so in the certainty that he has what he came for. But the world he steps back into is altered already. It wasn’t changed by his exit, or by the motion of his eyes across the page, but it was altered, is still being altered, long before, and after, he even conceived of reading a record of everything.
Paddy Dobson
21st June 2023