Bibliomania, part II

When the Old Man was finished writing he closed his pen and put it back in the breast pocket of his white button down shirt, closed the binder, and placed it back in its place on the shelf. Although he was content, as he always was when he had read for some time, surrounded by his books, the Old Man was not completely satisfied with the particular book he was reading. He would have only managed to pull out a dozen lines of his tightly packed handwriting from it when he would be finished, whereas good books, masterpieces of literature, could get him to blacken both sides of a page.

The Old Man saw all of literature as a kind of web, a great universe of three-dimensional inter-connectivity to be studied and analysed. Each book, he knew, made references, direct or indirect, voluntary or involuntary, to other books, which in turn were connected to still more books. This web went on infinitely, joining all works of Literature together in a grand, sprawling net of words and ideas. The Old Man sought to map out the different connections between all of the books he owned, all of the books he read, and he wrote down notes on the various inter-book references in his great binders to help him remember them. Sometimes, in moments of particular clarity, when he was reading a great work, written with impeccable style and intelligence, the connections would appear in his mind, clear and bright as strands of silver catching sunlight, and would etch themselves in the void of his thought, linking concepts and themes from one book to the next, across time and space, throughout Literature. In these moments the physical cocoon of knowledge he had created in his home, this room with its heavy smell, this place where his books and his binders filled with notes still kept him attached to reality, all of these things, already precarious, crumbled down and were made useless. In his mind he could read with infinite clarity of vision and understanding from any of his books, and more so he could read any book, written, imagined, or yet to be written, because he had transcended his own existence and glimpsed Literature. His moments of ecstatic literary clarity were not infrequent, but incredibly ephemeral, and he had only, so it seemed, a few seconds to read at great speed the words that passed before his mind’s eye. When he returned to himself, as if awakening from a trance, the Old Man often found himself confused and dazed for a few minutes, but then, regaining his composure and awareness, he would return to the book he had been originally reading, and return to his note taking, awaiting in silence for his next moment of ecstatic clarity. The Old Man had no religion, his religion was Literature; and in the same way his temple, his priests, his God, his prayers, all of these things of worship were encompassed in his books.

The Old Man now walked to the kitchen, and felt a surge of satisfaction and pride. These moments of intense joy came often enough in his life, punctuating his days like surprisingly big waves would a nice and sunny day at the beach, coming as a pleasant, refreshing surprise. His satisfaction originated from the fact that the Old Man felt he was special. He knew that he understood something about Literature -- what some would call reading, although he knew both concepts could not compare in meaning -- that no other human had grasped yet. He should not have cared, really, the Old Man dealt so little with other people, he should have been completely oblivious to their amount of knowledge and understanding in comparison to his, yet he could not help but feel superior.

The only door leading in and out from the room filled with books, the largest in the Old Man’s apartment, led to a small kitchen, which also doubled as an entrance, from which a third door led to a small bedroom, also connected to a minuscule bathroom. While the filth and old age of the room where the Old Man kept all of his books were masked by the incredible quantity of bound pages, in the rest of the apartment there was nothing to mask the dust on every surface, the grime darkening every corner and a sickening odor of stale food. The Old Man washed and ate little, and took as little care of his home as of himself: half the cupboards in the kitchen were without doors, the yellowed linoleum floor was peeling off in many places and the small windows were greasy and half-opaque with years of humidity and filth. The Old Man did not wash dishes, or make his bed, or clean his clothes; these were all activities he did not even think about, and if he would they would have immediately been dispensed as things the others did, those who did not understand the necessary nature of his occupation. The Old Man was oblivious to anything but his books.