Library of Unrequited Love by Sophie Divry Page A

readers getting off with each other and the books stacking up. I’ve got a right to something, haven’t I? I don’t see why, since I’m neither more nor less depressed than anyone else, I should have to spend my whole life not being noticed. My whole life, down in this basement. Martin, I know perfectly well, never looks at me. He’s totally indifferent to me. And yet I do everything I can to make it nice here. I’ve had armchairs brought in, I got hold of a pot plant. You don’t see many of those in libraries. Perhaps Martin doesn’t like rubber plants. I don’t know what I have to do to get his attention. Put a note in with his borrower’s slip? I can’t offer him a bunch of flowers! Such a lovely neck … No, never, he never so much as looks at me. He just sits there reading his old history books, that really getsme. I ought to go up to him, I really feel this, I should say, Martin, it’s so stupid reading all those books. Don’t fool yourself, how many of these wretched books do you think you know? Go on, you’ve got plenty of intelligence, so let’s say you read two books a week, for fifty years. In your lifetime, you’ll have read how many? Five thousand? That’s nothing. Nothing at all, compared to what we have here: two hundred and fifty thousand, seven hundred different books. And in the National Library, they’ve got fourteen million. We’re just cockroaches. So we’d do better to have a bit of fun, look at each other, talk and reproduce, don’t you think? If you like, we can go to Versailles, together, any time at all, we can go wherever you want to go, to some beach somewhere, I’ll be your Pompadour and we’ll love each other until the end of love, hand in hand, we’ll gaze at the sea, the sea that begins and ceases and then again begins, the pounding of the surf, the flow of water, the flow of light coming in new every day, fresh surges from the deep, the tide will carry us off, and the flow of paper, every year fifty thousand new titles, fifty thousand books fighting forthe chance to come and swell our groaning bookshelves, and every year they make me more aware of my limited span, my old age and my insignificance. Yes. It’s all an illusion, a massive illusion. You never feel so miserable as in a library. You can bow down in front of books all you like, try to understand, read and re-read them, but there’s no hope. You know this perfectly well. Books can’t do anything for us. They will always win out. In fact, if you don’t keep trying to hold the lid down on them, they’ll kill us all, the damn things. They have their own logic. Remember, last month? There was an armchair here and four reader’s seats. All gone. Replaced by two bookcases made of chipboard, for shelfmark 960. The counter-revolution is under way. We have to do something. Their aim is the elimination of all readers from the library. I can see the books planning it. They hold meetings, they pile up in towers, they barricade themselves in the stores, and once they’ve gathered enough strength, they charge. With the help of some of the librarians, the aristos on the staff, they’re getting the best places, bit by bit. The readers step back, stumble,resist a little, but gradually get pushed out, they’re in the way, human beings are in the way, and they know it. So, in the end, they throw up their hands and leave. That’s it.
Finito
, “The dead eat up the living” as the old saying goes. I’ll tell you how it works. The library is the arena where every day the Homeric battle begins between books and readers. In this struggle, the librarians are the referees. In this arena, they have a part to play. Either they’re cowards and take the side of the mountain of books, or they bravely help the worried reader. And in this fight, you have to let your conscience be your guide. But librarians