the pinakes

Anyway, I’m sure that even if you were some ancient dork in the stacks at the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, there was a bottle of ripple lying around or rocks, or a tiger eating a corpse or something more “fun” to do than read. But how do we evolve as a species, as carbon-based inhabitants of this fecund orb, without reading and interpreting our past in a place where they have actual pages to turn, where the whoosh of energy exchanges between woodpulps, the escape velocity of knowledge pushes forward on a fragile flap of skin from a fallen pine, a felled hemlock? And can we at least get a space heater in the stacks so Ms. Palermo doesn’t sit in the corner pretending she didn’t just set fire to A Separate Peace! MS. PALERMO! It’s a bildungsroman, not a god-damned marshmallow!