5

The Book of Chimerae

 

Compared to ducking around on mysterious reacquisition assignments to pluck books of intrigue from unlikely places, my lecturing duties failed to keep anything but the slightest interest. A terrible feeling of monotony took residence within me, as unshakeable as a pernicious flu. The dullness of my everyday operations left me gazing blankly at my office walls or losing interest in the middle of a lecture where I was at least to show some feigned good faith in being interested. My boredom finally reached the level of my students. I fell into moments of distracted dithering and rambling in my lectures, which was fine since half of my class had their faces fixed on their laptops while their fingers worked overtime to engage in online chats of no scholastic, but vitally social, consequence.

Perhaps more defeating was the ennui of knowing that to write anything, to research anything, was a pointless endeavour. If what Castellemare said was true, then all was already written, every possibility sewn up and expounded upon, exegeses of these that would run on infinitely. So, thinking of my own ambitions in research felt small and paltry since all the work had already been done by every possible me writing on every possible subject in every possible voice. I would have to content myself with producing the most infinitesimal sliver of relevance that would only be a repetition of what already existed in potentia in that infinite library. Perhaps there would reside the end product of my labours, identical in one edition, or written much better in another. The determinate fatalism of such a library emptied me of any resolve, and instead left me feeling deflated and listless. What, in fact, was the point of writing anything at all? The inexhaustible possibilities of my work already existed beyond that rift between the real and the infinite.

I batted back and forth the possibility of quitting my university lecture post, and it was only the guilt of all the time I had spent to acquire it through a seemingly endless trial of papers, exams, and defenses to possess the requisite degrees that stayed myself from making any rash decisions. When faced with the existence of infinite possibility actualized, it is difficult to summon the meaning of this rather slim reflection of it.

There also resided a troubling philosophical problem: if the books were infinite in their variation, this suggested that there were infinite worlds where in each resided another me. Perhaps not in all, but in enough of them to be infinite in number. I dimly hoped that there was a possible world with a possible me that was far more handsome, determined, successful, and less of a bland sot. The library would be a crossroads between all these infinite possible worlds, the repository of its infinite works. And if the library was already complete and determined, then all those worlds were just playing out their possibilities like a simulation… to what purpose? For whose amusement? Was Castellemare, the self-professed librarian, able to travel between worlds? Was he a necessary being that resided outside of all of these, only to dip into them to assign an infinite number of employees to reacquire lost texts? And what of this flaw of the library to have its books slip from its holdings? An imperfect multiverse? All of this sounded hokey and sci-fi fantasy to me, and I certainly was no reliable hand in speculative physics to summon up any feasible explanation.

It was hard to pursue this line of reasoning at the moment when I considered that these thoughts were already prefigured in some tract I may have written in another possible world, sitting on a shelf mocking me…or perhaps a series of millions of these where I disputed in favour or against various hypotheses. It would mean, at bottom, that any one book in the library was not itself in possession of the truth, but that the library as a whole was the total truth…And if that were the case, truth would be impossible to know. I corrected myself again: perhaps there was one book in the library that stated this proposition, and so therefore was the truth. But then again, would that not just be a truth relative to a possible world and not to all of them? I was finding myself lost in the desert of the infinite.

I made the weak and reliable retreat to Aristotle and his famous four causes for all things that exist. It didn't demonstrate any grand gift of thinking. The material cause of the Library: what is it made of? The efficient cause of the Library: how was it made? The formal cause of the Library: what is the essence of it? The final cause of the Library: what is its purpose? Well, I could fairly enough speculate that the Library was composed of books and shelves, perhaps a container to keep it enclosed (but if it were infinite, the container would be moot). It was made of books written by everyone in every possible world. The essence of the Library was Libraryness itself, a place that archives all written material. The purpose of it? That was where I was stuck, and without answering the final cause of the Library, my musings were empty and meaningless. There would be no way of saying if it were deficient, in error, or simply conceptual and therefore unreal. The Library was, in my tepid final answer, the sum total of all possible books.

I hated possible books for one reason: I had known enough people in my life who jumped into the glare of my attention to announce that they were writing a book, or would one day write one. Never making good on their promise or threat for reasons of time, a slackening of inclination, inability, or just forgetfulness, they could repose in the knowledge that their glowing idea to write a book was a fait accompli. This, I mused sourly, would also mean that the Library – just like the Internet if not worse – was also filled with a lot of garbage. A depressing thought, but one that had to be gobbled along with the thrilling mystery of the Library itself.

Castellemare, for his own reasons undisclosed to me, was not predisposed to resolve my difficulties with this problem. I knew better than to ask him for his manner was to speak in cryptic riddles or upbraid me for concerning myself with that which was not to be my concern. In the weeks-long silence, it seemed as though Castellemare had forgotten me, and I wondered if I was still employed. I was warned that the jobs were feast or famine, but I was getting a bit edgy, not least of all because of the insoluble riddle the Library's existence itself had lodged in my thinking, a tormenting sore. I made contact with Castellemare with the weak pretense of just catching up, checking to see if there were any other rogue books, and then to pose a few light-handed questions about the Library. His response was terse: I am well. Nothing has turned up yet. The Library is its own order and reason, so don't twist yourself up over it. So, on every count, my questions were frustrated and I felt put off, not least of which because the tone of his response made me feel guilty as though I were pestering him.

Another two week silence. I decided to sleuth out the answers from the only other person I knew could possibly grant them. I felt in my rights to know since to seek knowledge and propitiate curiousity is not in itself a betrayal. I began searching for any information I could about Setzer.

My research was not too long drawn or dramatic. I was able to locate Setzer with but a few carefully worded internet searches. It seemed that Setzer was neither too public nor too private, and there was probably nothing safer in this world than to have a website bobbing about in a sea of anonymity. Setzer ran what looked to be an on-the-side rare book collection business very modestly attired with some slightly flashy editions, but nothing that would call too much attention from a serious collector. There was even a contact link, and I followed it. It took me much longer to deliberate on what I was to say to him as the email field remained blank for nearly an hour before I took the decisive plunge. Even then I didn’t click on the ‘send’ button, but instead saved the email as a draft to further consider if this was the right tack to take.

Anton Setzer ran a four-storey bookstore in Detroit, mostly common and cheap used books bought and sold by dizzy undergraduates taking introductory literature or philosophy courses. I decided it would be better to pay the store a visit and hope to encounter Setzer in person. I packed a travel bag and boarded a bus. I didn’t know what to expect, and my questions were still premature and poorly formed, but I felt the urgency to follow through.

 

Outside the bus terminal, the Detroit sky was a glaring white-grey. The bookstore was only a block off from the terminal, all of it bracketed in a kind of nothingness in skewed view of the city core, the casino, and a government building guarded by a fleet of parked security vehicles in a closed-off street. I approached the boxy building that served as the bookstore, an edifice that failed to completely mask its prior function as a modestly sized factory. The unmistakable smell of used books and dust met me as I embarked the stairs to the first floor and front desk. Boxes of old magazines of no interest sat filed on the landings. Notices for readings and art events were pinned to the vestibule corkboards that flanked the entrance, some of these notices hopelessly out of date. Everything here seemed too typically like a middling used bookstore and bore none of the marks of intrigue and mystery I came to expect.

A middle-aged man with long grey, wavy hair and an aquiline nose was fiddling with an old ledger and a stack of unspectacular books by his right hand, a box filled with more of the same on the floor. Old Penguins and Everyman editions with their acid-burnt dun edges having been thumbed, their spines ridged with hairline fractures. He had antique spectacles on the middle of his bridge, and seemed more resignedly bored than engrossed with his labour. He heard me enter, looked up, and asked me if I needed any help.

“I…I’m just browsing,” I stammered, unsure and feeling a bit too foolish to ask outright if I may see a man named Setzer. “Where do you keep your philosophy books?”

He answered in a pleasant, yet dry and lazy way, “They are somewhat scattered around, but you’ll find a concentration of them at the very far end of the fourth floor, and some around the middle toward the north end of the second. Are you looking for Eastern or Western philosophy?”

“Oh, just Western.”

“Fourth floor. You may also have some luck along the south end wall of the second floor where we keep the paperback overflow. Our cataloguing system is rather eclectic.”

With that he gave a small shopkeeper's grin and went back to his ledger, totting up sums. He was right: the cataloguing system was indeed eclectic, but thoroughly detailed. I wandered for about an hour among shelves marked “speculative zoology”, “ornithological studies and dictionaries”, “Mid-East Mysteries”, “Early Michigan history and atlases”, and “Post Civil War congressional minutes”. I decided to return to the front desk after feebly summoning up some attention and interest to select something.

“Would you happen to know where I may find a Mr Anton Setzer?”

He took off his spectacles and levelled his eyes at me, but not with any meanness or suspicion. “Present. What can I do for you?”

I was taken aback. Was this harmless looking fellow who looked as though he were some aged poet wandering out of the romanticist period, huddled over a banal ledger the infamous traitor?

“I am sorry to disturb you, but I have come some way to ask a few questions if you would be kind enough to oblige.”

“Certainly. I trust that you work for Castellemare, a new recruit?”

He said this with none of the conspiratorial tone I would have expected. He said it so matter-of-factly that I may have instead asked him where he kept his French literature.

“Yes, I am new. How... How did you guess that -”

“You work for Castellemare? Oh, no one meets Castellemare and remains unchanged. Besides, you asked for me by name – how many booksellers get cornered by people who do that? You don't look like you have any books to sell or trade me, unless you have a few boxes out in the car. What can I do for you?”

“I am troubled.”

“Hm,” he said with an understanding yet none too interested nod. “I suppose the Library does present some difficulties. What’s your tally now?”

“Pardon?”

“The number of books you have reacquired for your employer.”

“Well, with the aid of my tutor, four so far.”

“You are new,” he said, barely concealing a grin. “My tally topped 1,250, a lot of them through unspeakable peril. Those days are far behind me now, thank goodness. I rather like the calm life, running the store, that sort of thing. Working for your current employer was very…complicated.”

“Pardon me for saying, but I was told that you betrayed him which is why you were dismissed from further duties.”

“Betrayal is such a heavy word, but I don’t doubt your employer’s love for the dramatic. Or was it Angelo who told you this?”

“Castellemare alluded to it, but, yes, it was Angelo who told me.”

“Ah, Angelo. Despite what happened, I still like him even if I was not altogether fond of his methods. He won’t steer you wrong. You are lucky to have such a good tutor – the job is not an easy one. You’d do well to heed his advice carefully. He was, after all, my protege.”

“Should we be speaking so openly like this? I mean...”

“It's a bookstore,” he said as if the location were soundproofed to eavesdropping. “I see maybe five or six customers a day. Be at liberty.”

“Okay, but is it true that you betrayed Castellemare?”

“People shift career trajectories for all sorts of reasons. And there are many versions of the same story. An employer will say that he fired an employee, and that employee will claim that he quit. In the end it means the same thing: the working relationship is dissolved. These things get shelved as just another uninteresting history. If you have come seeking advice, I am afraid I have nothing to spare since you should have all you need with your tutor and your employer to be successful at your new job. I presume you know what is at stake and you know the risks. The rest is unnecessary to know. You learn the ropes, you take care not to imperil the task to be completed, and you get paid. It’s really rather simple.”

“Yes, I gathered that, but I am having some philosophical difficulties with the very existence of this library and its books.”

“I am afraid I cannot help you there, friend. I am no philosopher. I just run this store, buying, selling, and cataloguing books. Questioning the Library will only amount to frustration and will impede your ability to perform your tasks.”

I waited there as though he had more to say, but he only continued with: “Will there be anything else?”

“Do you have any access to the Library anymore, or have you created one of your own?” I asked, unsure of why I had for some reason assumed he might have made a library of his own.

“How odd that you would ask that particular question. Well... Those days are far behind me. The only library I have created is all around you, nothing mysterious. All of these books were written and published in this world, and those are the only books I have in stock. When I parted ways with your current employer, I also took leave of that fantastic and improbable Library. I’m so sorry to disappoint you, but I sincerely wish you all the best at your job and finding the answers you crave.”

 

Setzer was mild, soft-spoken and affable enough, but I suspected that it was a clever ruse to throw me off. I decided to check into a hotel and investigate further. Perhaps it was my desire to uncover a mystery where one did not exist that prompted me, but there was something that was not adding up in Setzer’s demeanour, and I felt that he was hiding something from me. There was something far too convenient about Setzer’s newly chosen life. I waited until he closed the store and followed him from a safe distance.

I found myself outside a rather nondescript studio apartment complex. I found Setzer’s name on the buzzer board. I buzzed another tenant and said I was a pizza delivery person. I was let in and followed the stairs up to Setzer’s studio. When I got there I was shocked to find him standing in the doorway expecting me.

“I figured you would be more persistent and not so easily deterred. I suppose I should reward your efforts. Please, do come in.”

Along the lintel read, “Lux Ephemeris – Ars Reminiscendi” ironically under the seemingly permanent tenebrous fish-lens canopy of a dimly lit hallway. He led me into the studio proper and asked if I would like to share some of the wine he had just opened to allow breathe before dinner.

With rented glass in hand, I wandered from canvas to canvas that hung on his high walls while he excused himself for a few moments. There were no impressively monolithic shelves of books here as I would have expected. He returned with a bowl of fresh dates. He motioned me to the divan and he sat adjacent me on a scuffed and comfortably broken in wingback chair despite its size seemed dwarfed in the mostly empty space.

“So, you have a name, mysterious traveller, guest, and inquirer?”

“Gimaldi,” I stated, offering my hand and he politely declining to shake it as if it were an unnecessary formality.

“Gimaldi… Gimaldi,” he repeated, rolling it around in his mouth and looking up in some kind of reflection as if searching for where he might have heard that name before. He snapped back to meet my gaze. “Well… Gimaldi… welcome. You’re part of a very curious brotherhood of the book. Those without courage don’t last very long in that line of work. Funny, that… a touch ironic… That vision of the weak-bodied and meek scholar poring over his books being in possession of a higher courage than that of air force paratroopers. Hm. So courageously guided by our curiousity that we will uproot at just the scantest mention of a rare book on the other side of the world, or dissolve our sleeping hours in insomniac research rages with more tireless effort than your average bricklayer. We are precious in our way.”

“Mr. Setzer—”

“Call me Anton. My home is too small for formalities.”

“Anton, I have to admit to feeling foolish harassing you in this way. I am not predisposed by nature to stalking people to their front door.”

“Think nothing of it. I trust you are not… dangerous. I can tell curiousity from psychosis rather easily, although in our line of work that can sometimes be a very fine line.”

“I have come seeking answers. You see, I am vastly troubled by this Library…”

“And so you have come here. Let me guess: your mysterious employer will not yield straightforward answers, you think to go to his rival to attain satisfaction. I wish I could tell you that the matter you are inquiring about is not very difficult to translate into simpler, more direct terms. It demands the impossible upon the minds of men; namely, to conceive of the infinite. Anyone who contemplates the eternal and the infinite flirts with a very special kind of madness. Some, like our dear historical precedents among touched monks in the throes of medieval lore, have attained to the heights of ecstasy. Are you familiar with the state of ekstasis?”

“Vaguely. It is a transportation up toward the divine.”

“Something like that, but there is much more to it. Sometimes called the fourth, and highest, level of reading beyond the literal, metaphorical, and allegorical, it actually lifts the being out of time for a brief period. There is, in the ecstatic man, no sense of past or future, for it is all nested within the present… an infinite present where all things that have been or will be are happening simultaneously. It is not that ecstasy stops the clock, but that it is the clock with its hands pointing to every point along its diameter. A solid and complete temporality. Time as total. We who are cursed to drag the past across that thin splinter moment of the present with our eyes focused on the future are not capable of seeing time as a whole except the rare few of us, and even then just for a short time.”

“If this state of ecstasy is achievable, then would not time be progressing in that exact same way?”

“I don't quire follow.”

“For the person who is in ecstasy, outside of time. I mean, would there not be a sense in oneself of a past and future as distinct from that present moment of ecstasy one experiences? For, if I were in that state of ecstasy, I'd be able to detect the forward motion of time in that total time space.”

“Your conception of time is so commonly spatial. I'm sorry: that was rude of me. What I mean to say is that time is continuum and flow as much as it is already given as happened. The clocks on the wall, the calendar in the office, the day planner in your briefcase, the watch on your wrist, and the special events that mark the passing of otherwise arbitrary moments in time, are all just means of cutting time into understandable units for measurement and planning. Just so many ways that we try to carve the sea, and not what time really is.”

“I don’t mean to sound impatient, but could you make the relation clear for me, what bearing this has on the Library?”

“You will be impatient. It is the nature of hunger. You are famished for an answer, and so will want to eat the food before it is cooked. Very well. My point is that space and time are not so distinct or even similar as we would think they are. We ritually spatialize time or temporalize space… The angular degree on my clock suggests that it is nine hours after midday. It takes me five minutes to walk to the store and purchase fresh oranges. Einstein says that if we travel at the speed of light, time stops for us relative to everything that is moving slower in space. All of this is wrong. These are convenient ways to rationalize what cannot be apprehended by minds that are subject to the laws of space and time. The philosopher Kant was the closest in this regard before botching it all up when he said that space and time are the transcendental lenses with which we see the world. In a way, he was right. We are condemned by our weak rational faculties to see the world in this kludge of space and time. Space, like time, is infinite. The atomists knew this, and Nietzsche would later repeat that if time was infinite, and the purpose of the universe is to attain perfection, then it would have already happened ipso facto.”

“So, if I understand rightly, the Library is an infinite place residing in infinite time which is whole because it is not past or future, but the total present. Is this right?”

“You are getting warmer. But I must here toss in the real brain-twister: what of two spaces that are infinite?”

“Well, if space is full and total in encompassing everything, and if it is infinite, how could there be a second space? That would suggest a second container, and something would have to contain them both. Would that be time?”

“You are grasping. First you put forth the Aristotelian objection to infinite space, and then you mess it all up by adding another element you don’t understand to explain the first term you failed to comprehend. It is too often the case that the philosopher will attribute what cannot be understood to some convenient term that cannot be explained – like God, world, time, infinity – and declare his work done, at the terminus of explanation. This is a problem with the currency of philosophy: it doesn't exchange well even between two philosophers. All their words carry the affliction of ordinary language, which is highly particular and ambiguous.”

I hardly wanted to get into a discussion of linguistic relativism. “But what of this idea of two infinite spaces?”

“Well, there is a simple way of explaining that. If you believe a line is a space, for example, and you have two parallel lines extending infinitely, there you have two infinite spaces. But, I suppose you want something a little bit more relevant to the topic, more concrete as it pertains to the Library. It goes something like this: Castellemare does not hold a monopoly on the infinite. The infinite can be produced, even if it is allegedly prefigured in his vast Library. Come this way and I will show you.”

Setzer led me down a dimly lit hallway and opened a large door to an impossibility.

“Are you familiar with the term, ‘tesseract’?” he asked me.

“No.”

“In physics, it is an impossible space, a speculative thing. In essence, a tesseract is a space that is bigger than its container. I have been fortunate to create such a space. Follow me.”

There was something “workshoppish” about the space. Old books lay upon modified sawhorses and benches in various states of binding repair... or so I assumed; either books were being mended or broken apart. It was an inconspicuous front for what would follow. He led me to a large alcove wherein were three recessed doors--one with a carved ‘A’ in bold Roman type, and the others ‘B’ and ‘C’.

“What’s in here?” I asked.

“Which?… Ah! These doors! Well, let me preface by saying that an infinite library must be in constant formation, infinite at both ends, infinite in its making and unmaking. Books are made here in room A,” he explained with animated hand gestures, in the whimsical mode of a lecturer enamoured with his own subject of discussion. He looked the part of a marionette of a mad god.

“What kind of books?”

“We have a veritable arsenal of machines - very sophisticated, you understand, and I wouldn’t want to bore you with details even I do not fully grasp since I leave that to my team of technicians. Anyhow, this room, which is quite vast, has the sole purpose of completing novels.”

“So, it is a writing machine?”

“Of sorts. You see, it finishes all the novels every author who has ever lived has ever abandoned due to indolence, neglect, or premature death. The machines are endowed with a kind of language parser that keeps the entire author’s corpus in its memory, and continues the literary thread. Every author has a kind of fingerprint which identifies him or her. Every author has a limitation on their vocabulary, will stylistically employ certain words in relation, and reiterate the same themes. Every author has but one megatext, and multiple works are just slices of it. So, here are the machines that finish every author's megatext. Spinning away! More tales!”

“But if Castellemare’s Library is infinite, would it not already house those works in its infinite possibility?”

“For sure, yes, of course! But… there is a different reason for this… Never mind! Did you know it also finishes books by authors who never lived? Okay, well, moving right along… room B… Beyond this door is an incalculably vast warehouse wherein are housed every novel that remained unfinished by readers. You never know what gem lies in those many novels you began, but never finished! I am not particularly fond of this room, however, since it says something awful about you people. So, finally, room C is my absolute favourite: it houses the most stupendous invention of all time… The Anonymizer!”

“The name seems to announce its function.”

“Doesn’t it?” he said with a face beaming with sallow, perspiring lunacy. There was now no trace of the mild and dusty man I had met only hours ago. Instead, he was being overtaken by rapid animation. “It’s a swell room! A conveyor belt feeds into this room from the library and into the Anonymizer to… make all the works anonymous.”

“What purpose does that serve?”

“I’m a bit hurt and perplexed by this seemingly dismissive and irreverent question. What library can call itself complete without anonymous works?”

I was beginning to think better of questioning for what passed for Setzer’s logic. I could not grasp any real, single purpose to this entire enterprise. The more information I received about this brand of infinite library, the more the questions multiplied. He must have suffered a setback after being fired.

As if reading my thoughts, “the bifurcation of the question is one of the most precious blooms of an infinite library. For what is knowledge - and non-knowledge, outright falsehoods, myths and facts - but that feeling of realizing more of what one does not know?”

“But this place is not so much infinite as an attempt to construct the infinite through machinic artifice.”

“Gimaldi, I would tell you my so-called master plan, but that would be to ask you to be disloyal to your employer. One cannot work for two masters. It simply is not done. I’ve already compromised myself considerably in showing you this much.”

“I appreciate that. But now I must admit a ferocious curiousity for what you call your master plan.”

“Ah, I am so weak to requests since I am accommodating by nature, to a fault. I suppose it would make no difference if Castellemare knew. He probably already does and sees it as no real threat. Simply put, I am in the process of overproduction. I know for every book produced here, it repeats in the infinite Library. I have a formula that proves these books do not already reside in his holdings. I have discovered the secret of creating the new. I know how to produce those things that exist outside totality. His Library will absorb these, and this will cause a violent displacement effect. Simply, it means that by bucking the logical apparatus of his Library, I push more of the books through that rift and into the real where people like you need to reacquire them. I’m overstuffing the machine beyond its capacity. I'm also ensuring that you'll always have work,” he added with a wink. “Besides, what is this talk of artifice? Against what? The natural? Be a bit more baroque and play with the border between the two a bit more.”

“So you are trying to make things more difficult for Castellemare? Why?”

“Because, my friend, it amuses me. Whereas I could have stayed mired in these terribly maddening questions of the infinite like yourself and feel that there is no point to production of any text, I have learned the hardest lesson: the need and importance of play. What can one do in the face of such an impossible infinity but laugh and find ways to tweak it, to have some degree of mastery? I restore control over the endless flux by following a deviant logic. To the domain of order I introduce the clinamen of chaos. Oh, it isn’t enough to collapse order, but I put it through its paces. Of what interest is a logic and a reality that goes untested? Yes, I am playing with Castellemare.”

“Do you think he knows?”

“He must. He can barely keep up with the number of texts that have been displaced. I am sure it gives him a headache. He is desperate for more reliable employees. That desperation makes him seek far and wide and lower the criteria. No offence, but you aren’t his ideal candidate.”

“None taken. I have no basis for comparison beyond Angelo. But don’t you worry that this will increase the chances that one of those dangerous texts may be discovered by those not familiar with the Library? Would that not cause untold chaos?”

“A storm in a teacup. You scholars amuse me, amplifying the importance of your station and that of knowledge. The world will not be thrown on its ear if something is discovered. It may just be perceived as a fraud anyway, or relegated to the pile of so many other unsolved puzzles for the academic to dicker with. Do you really stand by the arrogant assumption that bizarre knowledge and contradiction actually means anything to the world? When two-thirds of the world does not have clean running water, I really don’t think a newly discovered version of Revelations is going to have any impact. At best, it will have people scratching their heads for a little while, and only a small percentage of them at that. The wars, famine, television shows, and the mass production of novelty key chains will continue unaffected. Keep all of this in its proper perspective. Reading is the domain of the shrinking few. You could tell a crowded bus station of people that Hitler died in 1965 in Stockholm after losing the Crimean War and you will barely find a small pocket of people who would disagree. Do you really think a book that would substantiate that view would make much of an impression on those that simply do not know history? And if it were written by some breast-enhanced celebrity, then it would be taken in without question.”

“That’s a pretty cynical view.”

“A dog’s bark is not as real as its bite. I like to think that this is the real view.”

“Then I don’t really understand Castellemare’s desperation.”

“He overworks himself. He makes the fallacious error of illicit importance. He is afflicted with the mania that comes with the position of Librarian. Books have a curious effect on those with certain predispositions to fall into obsession. I know what his affliction truly belies: the absolute meaninglessness of his entire Library. To have everything is to know nothing. Too much information is no information at all. Endless disputes, contradictions, and the like is a kind of truth, but never a solid and singular Truth. For all his infinite books, and mine, there may as well just be one: it is all chimera. The Truth is unattainable. It is constructed.”

“Isn’t that a rather nihilistic viewpoint to hold?”

“Submit to the view that truth is attainable and you suffer the worst kind of nihilism. When it comes to light that your found truth is so paltry, arbitrary, an infinitesimal piece of a puzzle of so many truths, and then you realize that your efforts were for naught. Embrace the reality that truth cannot be acquired by one or many hands, and you begin to feel… free, no longer chained to the ballast of a lone ship tossing restlessly upon a sea that knows or cares not for your version of truth. Even a sailor knows that the sea speaks the truth where the ship is but a small and inconsequential interloper enfolded within the force of waves and currents. I should stop speaking in nautical metaphors. Anyway, what is the value of all that 'information' in the Library?”

I tried to crunch up a response, but he beat me to it: “Information that is immortal, eternal, is always present has no value whatsoever. The sum total of knowledge, especially if it is eternal, is zip. Remember that there is no past or future in ecstatic time: only all of time in the present. This means everything that is knowable exists in that state, and its value is nil. What would give information value? That is the next project! Information decay. But how is that possible if there is no past or future? Ah, but I lied! There is: the irreversible arrow of time! Anyway... I must allow you to make your departure; it is late for me and I feel fatigued. Thank you for stopping by. Hopefully I was able to shed some light on some of your nagging problems. If not, well,” and he shrugged.

Setzer escorted me from the workshop and to the front entrance. It seemed somewhat an abrupt ending for his giving forth on the topic of infinity and truth.

“Remember, Gimaldi,” he said in parting. “All the books may as well be just one. All of it, chimera. Wisps of smoke. Fabulations and mirages. Safe journey. We may meet again, but I doubt it, and hopefully not too soon. Everything is a portent, a prognostic sign!”

With that he closed his door and I was left numbly in the hallway pacing slowly away, processing all that I had heard and seen. But if what he said held true, and he was dedicated to displacing more books out of the Library, why was I not being tapped for more work? There was something unsettling about Setzer's answers to me. It seemed as though, in some way, he found the idea of an infinite Library a grotesque misunderstanding. In fact, there were shades of W.O. Quine in what he said, although Quine was far more coherent. In Quine's assessment of Borges' Library of Babel, he reasoned that the library was finite and could be reproduced in a matter of seconds by simply writing a dot on one page and a dash on the other, reproducing the entire contents by Morse code. But then couldn't the same be said of writing out the alphabet and simply saying that the rearrangement of the letters would produce every possible variation?

The visit with Setzer was perplexing, and I had no reliable way of testing whether or not he was mad.