Ode To the Library: A Mausoleum of Thought

Dust, Words & Ink Bound Eternally, as Ancient Though Immortalized on Paper Artifacts

My nickname was always "The Librarian"...

As someone who spent many decades hanging out in the library, among the massive stacks of books, nothing conjures the pleasure of learning, exploring, and feeding my muse. It is the alchemy derived from the spirit of the tree from whence it came, and the mental imprint of the author of the work. Like the reverence one feels visiting the graveyard of famous people, I have always felt a visit to the library was likened to a tombstone.

I also found it comforting, as if visiting a beloved family member, all those literary characters you love, all those poems that make you cry, all those spectacular mental pictures that pass through the theatre of your Mind's Eye. The metaphysical token is a sublime oracle of thought. Books are a mental artifact of the author's thoughts that are preserved for hundreds, sometimes even thousands of years...timeless and amazing that we change little thought the years are vast between author and reader.

Each book, the grave of a mind, at least for me I have always been drawn to literature most ancient, from archaeological inscriptions and incantations, to classical literature, but most of all Anglo-Irish, Old English, Shakespeare to Chaucer, Gothic, Romantic, and Victorian poetry literature.

I love the texture of the leather cover, the way it feels when you hold it in your hands. I love the the dull sparkle of the gilting, the sound of the pages are like flickering music, and I even love the musty smell and cloud of dust that accompanies an antiquarian book, it is unique and nostalgic, inspirational, and joyful because it represents sharing the thoughts of the writer with the mind of the reader.

No matter how many hundreds of years ago they lived and died...they become immortalized within this capsule of intellect. Paper and ink entwined in an alchemical marriage, laid down by the long dead hand of the artist, but whose mind dwells in perpetuity, spectre-like, lingering over the work it made so long ago, and resurrected each time it connects with the reader, the one who rediscovers them, giving them the spark of existence once again...it's alive.

-By Carmen Zavislake