NaNoWriMo: A Library and A Book

An excerpt from my NaNoWriMo Novel The Building:

There’s a book out there that you’re not meant to read. It answers far more questions than any book was ever supposed to address—far more questions than any one, right-thinking individual would ever want to ask. Some people have postulated that book and this book to be one and the same, but that would be a rather difficult reality to sustain. For, you see, that book of Answers To Questions Unposed exists in a library just as impossible as the volume itself. It’s a library that seems to make a habit of bringing together answers and connecting threads. In that respect, it is rather un-librarian.

Libraries were created as repositories: Huge halls of stacks for lumping together the disparate trains of thought of whole language societies. A librarian, or perhaps the Duey Decimal System would have you believe that libraries are very organized places, and they would try to use the very official-sounding language of numbers as proof of their organization. However Fiction and Non Fiction and Fantasy and Do It Yourself are vain attempts at classifying a multitude of volumes whose only common trait is entropy.

This impossible library that is home to the impossible tome is distinctly un-librarian in that it actually succeeds where all the libraries that have come before it have failed: it organizes a dizzying number of disparate volumes into a more or less cohesive whole. Even where the individual texts differ, its overarching organizational structure of departments or genres is truer than any traditional library. Whether that makes it un-librarian or proto-librarian—the library of the world of Forms, the Library Archetype—is not for me to say, but it’s the case that it’s the only library to ever get it right.

That’s because, as some wise man once said in the annals of history, there are only X original types of stories that mankind have ever succeeded in telling. That X has varied between different wise men from X=2 to X=7. The truth is that the X should = 9. There are nine original forms of story, from which every single written human endeavor has descended. This impossible library had only nine genres within it, and they were one and the same with these nine original branches of story.

It’s not much use in cataloguing them, though, as the library was so impossible that it could be argued that it was responsible for its own fiery end. Any discussion of impossible volumes or impossible collections has been rendered moot by immolation. It’s for that reason that this book couldn’t possibly be that book, so do yourself a favour and quit hoping.