Authenticity III - What Does It Matter in the End

"Library," by Lori Nix, from The City series

for L.T.

My friend emails me this picture. She's found it on a site of 'found things' - original provenance unknown.

She knows I love libraries the way young girls are said to love horses: giddily, mystically, reverentially. She knows I'll love this picture, and I do.

The books nestle like birds in a dovecote, a dovecote built high as the sky, and there is the sky - what? - oh - the simplest blue at the tippy-top, where the shell of the building has been split away like the top of a soft-boiled egg tapped with spoon and summarily uplifted - and the sun washes down upon the branches - the what? - the leafy branches of the trees - birch? - which receive it, the golden light, with the speechless wisdom of every book ever written.

Who are those figures up by the crown molding? Rulers? Thinkers? Saints?

Why are those chairs tipped over, those books lying on the ground? Are these signs of the violence of humans or the violence of nature? Or perhaps only the stately violence of time.

What countries appear on that globe? What are their names, where are their boundaries drawn?

And who lights the glass globes mounted by the stacks? And by what means do they illuminate? Bulb, kerosene, whale oil? Firefly.

I call my friend, hot and bothered: Is this real or did someone make it? Did this - happen - or is it staged, a theater set or an art installation? I feel a push to know, to have settled this matter of which.
It's real, she decides. I think, she adds.
(This is very like her. This is the only answer she would ever give; always, always this friend would rather err on the side of believing than doubting. I knew this when I called, when I put the question to her. I knew but asked anyway.)

As soon as she answers, I think I understand it's not real. I look more closely: are those red-and-blue birds perched on two of the branches? Whoever heard of such red-and-blue birds? Whoever heard of a building this damaged, in this state of serious disrepair for at least as long as it takes a tree to grow to towering height, preserving its contents relatively intact: the glass unsmashed, the balconies unsagging, the gold trim still agleam? Wherever existed such strange beauty?

But this line of reasoning does not help, for the answer to the last question is: in life.

Oh gift, oh gratitude. If you know, don't tell me. It isn't that I crave blindness. Only that in a certain light - the light of cast-off ceilings, the light of rain-spattered words - all that is, is. Oh democracy. The real and the made-up: those fine, those stalwart citizens of our waking dreams. Red and blue. Book and tree. Globe and globe. What does it matter in the end.

With mixed feelings, I add this update: the image was found at lorinix.net. I have been illuminated, and go off to mourn, lightly...