No history books will enshrine the recently-deposed regime responsible for obliterating the Library of Alexandria. As the Library is rebuilt, the offending censors are appropriately forgotten, sometimes forever. Half-stocked with books, cheeky Alexandria takes on a gap-toothed cheshire grin. The Library remains chipper, never decaying from within, only destroyed from without.
By sheer volume, the Library has known and forgotten the world many times over, though never bothering to take an inventory. Its patrons rumor of its contents: magical recipebooks; necromonicons; blueprints for the pyramids; an alchemical method; a self-addressed letter from Jesus to Daddy; a proof for the true meaning of life; a proof for the meaning of truth; a proof for the meaning of meaning. Some rumor of herds of intralibrarian gazelle. Some rumor of an enclave in the northeastern wing, complete with bunkbeds and a mayor. Some rumor of book nymphs, presumably you.
Spines and spaces occupy every shelf, susurruses and silence occupy every aisle. Soaring shelves partition the library into a labyrinth full of forks and corridors, simplifying navigation into discrete rights and lefts and forwards. Of no apparent help, this particular instance of the Library of Alexandria abides by Dewey Decimal Classification. Some patrons still manage to become lost though inundated among so many structures: architectures, maps, taxonomies, logics, alphabets, grammars, dogmas, philosophies. Those in search of specific tomes find their quarry no faster than those roaming aimlessly.
Whichever of the Libraries stands, it always lures the same people. The trenches surge with idealists and idiots, scholars and madmen, all sorts insatiable, sloshing against the walls, consuming everything, molesting nothing. Yet you glide through the chaos with the elegance of an aphorism. I admire you through an aperture, peripherally squared by Principia, Quixote, Symposium, and Genesis.
The absent books permit me to see your candlelit silhouette. I selfishly wish for an empty library so I could see all the parts of you, but then neither of us would be here at all. I see you preoccupied, your eyes scanning passages, your lips mouthing words reflexively, your thumbs thumbing page corners. You are probably searching for something. For your attention, I write a book, put it on the shelf, and wait for you to read it. Not yet, you don't.
Somebody, maybe the Moors, razes Alexandria. When the Library is rebuilt, the new librarians ensure every book and rumor and aperture returns.
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