Awakening by William Horwood

Author:William Horwood [Horwood, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-08-09T19:34:33+00:00

28

THIEF

The Great Library of Brum opened its doors on a Sunday at nine, when, in a time of pilgrimage, most folk were still asleep, or just getting up.

But every library had its Sad Readers, their lives bound to the hours of opening and closing of their alma mater, they having so little else in their lives that to avoid the reality of its emptiness they must escape into filing cards, bibliographies, the comfort of a solitary desk, the pursuit of reference, the rediscovery of something forgotten which was not worth remembering, attachment to things so obscure that the only other hydden who know what they are talking about are Sad Readers in other libraries somewhere across the Hyddenworld. Their only respite from the dusty hours inside being the daily small pleasure of the miserable munched brotkin of a lunch alone outside watching the real world go by. Then back to work and the long walk to the scholar’s grave.

Pity them, for they know no other life than that, slinking back and forth from board, bed and guttering hearth, their minds filled with scholarship of a desperate kind and strange thoughts that are best suppressed. Like: is the most exciting thing that ever happened to this tome, which only two or three folk have looked at in eight hundred years, that it was half eaten by bookworms and half burnt by fire?

‘What is it you do?’ their acquaintances ask uneasily.

‘I . . . well, I . . .’ But the explanation falters before the incomprehension of their interlocutor and they never say much that makes sense.

For such as these, late opening or shorter Winter hours or, something worse by far, no opening at all, are trials to be borne with the seasons and the years as their hair grows grey, their skin ever more pale, their muscles flaccid, their minds unused except in parts, their emotions flat.

Until something happens and their world briefly turns to something different and new.

A flood perhaps – that’s news.

A commotion in a reading room – that’s exciting.

A retirement of a librarian loved, so far as love creeps about the stacks, wan and unexpressed as it must be – that’s sad.

Then back to normal, and another year or two or three rolls on until something else, so exciting that it’s news, happens and their year is made.

Or, once in a rarer while, ten years perhaps, part of the library roof falls in. That’s a year to remember.

Or, through mismanagement and a confluence of unfortunate events, every fifty years or so, a fire happens, or a Reader goes insane.

That’s good news as well.

Only once a century, or even once in five centuries, does something truly terrible happen, so terrible that it is too much for such Readers as those to bear. They deny it ever did. They return the following day as if all is normal and well.

They deny that sometimes life itself is changed for ever and their world, perhaps the whole of the Hyddenworld, will never be the same again.

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