When you store books on shelves, you must make and can assure you again that the number of Dewey's book is that you tidy up a notch above that Book on the left and one notch below that which is his right. The books are loaded on a wooden cart with four wheels, about fifty to one hundred pounds per load, and when you guide your little car in the maze of reservations, you're alone, always and forever only because access to reservations is forbidden to everyone except the staff of the library, and the only other person you ever see is one of the other minions, your colleagues, working in the table in front of the elevator. There are several floors, each identical to everyone else: a huge windowless room filled with row upon row of tall gray metal shelves, all crammed with as many books they can contain tens of thousands of pounds Hundreds of thousands of pounds, a million pounds, and at times even you, who loves books as much as anybody in this world, you're taken stupor, anxiety and even nausea when you consider how many billions words, how many tens of billions of words in these books. For hours each day you live shut away from the world, living in what you end up feeling like a balloon without air, although it must be because of the air you breathe, but it is a dead air, air that has not moved for centuries and in this suffocating environment you often feel drowsy, drugged to the point of being only half conscious, and you must fight against the urge to sleep down and fall asleep.
Paul Auster
Invisible
Translated from the U.S. by Christine Le Boeuf
Actes Sud, 2010
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