He cannot talk to his father about Our Library of the Future, but even if he could, I don’t know if he would be able to. There is a (radical?) softness to his openness to the flow of books from here to there, not to mention my presence as a narrator of sorts, that questions the hard-edged masculinity of all those famed authorial announcements about packing or unpacking one’s library that his father listened to (perhaps in spite of himself). As a ghost, albeit a fictional one, I appreciate how tenderly he takes books off of the shelves I haunt, holds them in his soft hands, and moves them carefully to his backpack. While I am not there to see what happens next, I imagine he just as carefully takes them out in his campus office, arranges them meticulously across a table, and finds the best light to photograph them for the image that accompanies my words typed up by him each day. When he returns home, with the same books, to place them in another bookcase – the Rojo – to create another library, I often sense an increasing sadness in his large-boned frame. Perhaps it is because this process is coming to an end; or he is thinking of an old friend who also pays attention to the abcs of books, words, letter and other things, or maybe it is because he knows that his true library is elsewhere and impossible for him to hold onto. In this way, he is just like Psyche in his old friend Apuleius’ novel who must sort a huge pile different seeds into separate piles before the next morning. The task seems impossible – and is impossible – given her timeframe, until an army of ants comes to her aid, and helps her sort the seeds. I am not saying I am that army of ants (although I often feel like a character in Apuleius’ fiction about a man-turned-donkey-and-back-again), although one reason I speak to him in this way is to encourage him in his equally impossible task. And, when this is all said and done a couple of days from now; when the last book is placed in the Rojo and it becomes Our Library of the Future; it will be theses tender lessons that matter most. His weak, all-too human body moving through the house like the books he carries and positions, and me, no longer asking him to write these posts, still there looking out at him from these shelves, moving him and willing him on, in other, quieter ways.
