Unpacking Books Is A Revelatory Activity.

I Had A Library Of Maybe 1,000 Books In My Room In Buenos Aires. I Did Have The Sense That Everything There Was Organised In The Right Way. You'll Probably Think I Needed Serious Psychiatric Treatment, But There Were Times When I Would Not Buy A Book Because I Knew It Wouldn't Fit One Of The Categories Into Which I Had Divided The Library.

I Quickly Learned That Reading Is Cumulative And Proceeds By Geometrical Progression: Each New Reading Builds Upon Whatever The Reader Has Read Before.

If The Library Of Alexandria Was The Emblem Of Our Ambition Of Omniscience, The Web Is The Emblem Of Our Ambition Of Omnipresence; The Library That Contained Everything Has Become The Library That Contains Anything.

Through Ignorance, Through Faith, Through Intelligence, Through Trickery And Cunning, Through Illumination, The Reader Rewrites The Text With The Same Words Of The Original But Under Another Heading, Re-creating It, As It Were, In The Very Act Of Bringing It Into Being.

We Can Imagine The Books We'd Like To Read, Even If They Have Not Yet Been Written, And We Can Imagine Libraries Full Of Books We Would Like To Possess, Even If They Are Well Beyond Our Reacher, Because We Enjoy Dreaming Up A Library That Reflects Every One Of Our Interests And Every One Of Our Foibles--a Library That, In Its Variety And Complexity, Fully Reflects The Reader We Are.