Chapter 1_7%

There was a sense of stage business——that churn of activity you can't hear or see but you feel at a theater in the instance before the curtain rises——of people finding their places and things being set right, before the burst of action begins. The library entrances have been thrown open thousands of times since 1859, the year that a public library first existed in Los Angeles. Yet every time the security guard hollers out that the library has opened, there is a quickening in the air and the feeling that something significant is about to unfold——the play is about to begin.
Even when I was in my last year of high school and could drive myself to the library, my mother and I  still went together now and then, and the trip unfolded exactly as it did when I was a child, with all the same beats and pauses and comments and reveries, the same perfect pensive rhythm we followed so many time before.
You didn't read it in order to have an object that had to be housed and looked after forever, a memento  of the purpose for which it was obtained. The reading of the book was a journey. There was no need for souvenirs.
Libraries might have become just a bookmark of memory more than an actual place, a way to call up an emotion of a moment that occurred long ago, something that was fused with "mother" and "the past" in my mind.
As my son and I drove to meet the librarian, I was flooded by a sense of familiarity, a gut-level recollection of this journey, of parent and child on their way to the library. I had taken this trip so many times before, but now it was turned on its head, and I was the parent bringing my child on that special trip
The sense of gentle, steady busyness, like water on a rolling boil, was just the same.
It wasn't that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured here, collected here, and in all libraries——and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up——not just stopped but saved. The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.
It seemed like I could drive and drive and the city would just keep unfurling, almost as if it were a map of LA being unrolled as I drove over it, rather than a real city that started and stopped somewhere specific.
So the spell libraries once cast on me was renewed. Maybe it had never really been extinguished, although I had been away long enough that it was like visiting a country I'd loved but forgotten as my life went galloping by.
The building——buff-coloured, with black inset windows and a number of small entrances——is a fantasia of right angles and nooks and plateaus and terraces and balconies that step up to a single central pyramid surfaced with coloured tiles and topped with a bronze sculpture of an open flame held in a human hand. It managed to look ancient and modern at the same time. As I approached, the simple blocky form of the building resolved into a throng of bas-relief stone figures on every wall.
The biggest library fire in American history had been upstaged by the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown
The books burned while most of us were waiting to see if we were about to witness the end of the world