The Library Of Eternity

This is a 'thought poem' that speculates on the possibility (probability?) that there are other intelligent, sentient life-forms in this vast Universe. And if so, they might have libraries too.

Imagine you, a lover of books and the written word,

chanced to visit the greatest library in the world,

with every book ever written, in every language:

books in English and Flemish and Urdu and Dutch

and Hindi and Spanish and Korean and Swahili and

Russian and Samoan and Basque and Japanese and

Khmer and Portuguese and Italian and Swedish and

Arabic and Welsh and Chinese and Finnish and

thousands of other languages, even those that

died like Latin and ancient Greek and Sumerian....

Yet those millions of books with billions of pages

imprinted with trillions of words only fill a rather

small room, almost just a closet, of this vast library...

in myriad other rooms there are writings from

other planets in billions of galaxies spanning all of

the Universe, written in languages unknown to you

by beings different yet in some ways very much

like the seven billion humans on our good earth.

So you grieve to think that no one could ever,

even in a billion years, read all those words,

could ever know all that knowledge-- yet

some Being, somewhere in the Cosmos,

wrote each word long before  it was written....

Reviews

[jacob erin-cilberto]

but just even attempting to read as many of them as we can...that is a good thing...

i am an avid reader, but strange for an English teacher...i actually like detective and horror novels much more than those "Classics" except for "Catcher in the Rye"-
i like how your poem encompasses the books written in every language...universal.
j.

[Nolo Segundo]

Yes, J., it's like climbing Everest in bare feet. I too was an English teacher and I also like reading mysteries, though for horror I read history.

[jacob erin-cilberto]

Nolo, you surely have a point there...history having so much horror in it....who needs Stephen King?

[Zedrisch]

I love that thought and I myself like to think that way about eternity and a being or beings beyond time and space. Also I like your choice of words here a lot - simple but powerful.
I will definitely look further into your writing.

[Nolo Segundo]

Thank you--yes, it's daunting how many books there are-- my publisher just put my book, 'The Enormity Of Existence', on Amazon--which tells me there are over 420,000 books of poetry!!!

[Julie McCarthy (juliesp..]

Love love love this
The first book I read was Anne of green gables I was ten confined to bed with a leg disease for several weeks then I read little women then my love for books began love your poem

[Nolo Segundo]

Thanks Julie-- not sure of their future as the young seem to love their laptops more than books..

[John the Baptist]

Interesting concept described here. I believe the subconscious mind is a portal to a higher consciousness, the extent of which goes beyond the capacity of the human imagination.

[Nolo Segundo]

Amen Bro! I suspect it comes from the soul....

[nazia]

Books. Fodder for our mind and imagination.....
they bridge the gap between nations and generation..
Really loved your concept :)

[Nolo Segundo]

Thanks Nazia-- the idea just came to me one day while thinking there are probably other sentient species in our vast Universe.

[nazia]

Indeed there are :)

[John Alexander McFadyen]

I love the extension of this long established human intellectual obsession into the alien world. We ignore history at our peril/cost. We once saw the earth flat and never contemplated sailing the oceans. Now we have crawled beyond the earth and there is yet more 'flat' packed mysteries awaiting us.

[Nolo Segundo]

Oh yes, my friend! There are mysteries inter-weaved with each human life, and I'm sure there are myriad mysteries throughout the Universe--and maybe in a host of other universes as well--truly mind-boggling!

[NotUsinganymore]

Very nice pom. c: I've been to a very big Library in South Korea, I think they had like over 50,000 books or maybe more. It was really cool and big. I remember there was some American magazines and books too.

[Nolo Segundo]

Thank you for the compliment-- in 1975 I visited Seoul on a brief vacation from my job teaching ESL in Tokyo-- it's a very big and fascinating city!

[NotUsinganymore]

Very nice. I am located in Japan currently actually. In Tokyo right now.

[Robert Trakofler]

I think my ears would drip letters and my tears would cry phrases but i would have to keep turning those pages! I often muse that alien intelligence is standing in the background awaiting our collective adolescences to end and unfortunately that is not in our immediate future it seems:(

[Nolo Segundo]

Thanks B.B.-- and in this vast Universe I'd be surprised if we were the only intelligent species, or even the most intelligent. Curiously, this was attested to by Dr. Eben Alexander in his book about his NDE, 'Proof of Heaven', where he said he gained some incredible esoteric knowledge, including there are myriad universes. Having had my own twilight zone sort of experiences, I can't discount it all.

[Chris Shaw]

What an interesting thought you have been contemplating. I have a job to keep up my reading at the moment. With the possibilities of all that additional reading material for a universal library, we'll that is mind blowing.

Chris

[Nolo Segundo]

Well, Chris, over 1/2 a million different titles are published in America alone every year! 100,000 of them are novels-- though few of them on the level of Dickens or Hemingway I imagine. It is mind blowing.