It was hot in the room, but it felt to him far less stifling than the poetry reading below. He pulled out a book here and there, but what kept catching his attention were the diagonal tunnels of sunlight rolling in through the dormer windows. All around him dust motes rose and fell, shimmering, quivering in those shafts of roiling light. He found several shelves full of old editions of classical writers and began vaguely browsing, hoping to find a cheap edition of Virgil's Aeneid, which he had only ever read in a borrowed copy. It wasn't really the great poem of antiquity that Dorrigo Evans wanted though, but the aura he felt around such books--an aura that both radiated outwards and took him inwards to another world that said to him that he was not alone.
And this sense, this feeling of communion, would at moments overwhelm him. At such times he had the sensation that there was only one book in the universe, and that all books were simply portals into this greater ongoing work--an inexhaustible, beautiful world that was not imaginary but the world as it truly was, a book without beginning or end.
Any lover of books recognizes this sentiment. This is why Kindles and other electronic formats can never best the printed word. I go into my office or my living room or my family room and I am surrounded by artifacts of civilization, imagination, and learning. One of the jokes of Western philosophy is that everything written in the past 2500 years is a footnote to Plato, and the sentiment Flanagan expresses here gets at the truth in that truism. As we read and write we participate in a conversation that was begun thousands of years before us and will continue thousands of years after us.
World without end, amen.
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