Prematurely Mothballed

An old west African witticism claims that “when an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.” I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the translation. The English here sounds like literal truth. This is a boldly stated metaphor that cares little for poetry. It implies, to me, a curdling desperation—a dark pressure to convince. No time for rhyme or rhythm, no juxtaposition. The aged are libraries. Repositories. Knowledge in a precious form. Vulnerable to life’s ravages. Just as bricks crack and fall apart, the most sage of scholars and the shrewdest of gossips will one day fall apart.

Standing outside the library as its rafters lit up like halogen tubes and its windows roared like lions, manes of citrus-hued fire curling over their shoulders, I couldn’t help but feel the screams of each book, their full lives and all that experience melting away. Words trundling off the page in rivulets of black… Smoky appendages lovingly brushing each spine one last time before the consuming red would cut through the shelves like a gash… The spray of the water, a cascade meant to save the world around this mess by ending everything inside…

If I cried, the heat of it all vaporized my tears before I felt them. The secrets within a library—books out of print a half dozen decades, secret scrawls on the underside of shelves, local newspapers dating back to before the civil war—they’re precious. We don’t have many to lose, and we can’t focus every time a secret is lost. Listen to what is being said. Knowledge collects on people like dust in the corners of rooms. It piles up, but it is there for the taking if you know where to seek it.