TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

The Dreamed Part

age of a tree when it’s chopped down—from the wood that the paper’s made of we come and to the wood and paper we return. And you could—following titles and authors, high and low, clear sequences and untimely detours, that put Mary Shelley next to Charles Bukowski next to Ford Madox Ford next to Juan Carlos Onetti next to Cervantes—read the novel of your own existence, punctuated every so often by the parentheses of your own books that were written, from “Once upon a time . . .” to “And they died happy.” The library as liferary . Like an alternate but parallel form of the biography. A personal bibliography. The library is the mirror of the soul that you sold to the Devil or to God or to both; because, after all, if they exist, they are the same person. That person who enjoys writing us so much, complete with errors and moments of absolute genius, but who later goes and going and gone.

And they haven’t the slightest interest in reading us.

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