"Library of Congress"

"You peer down a lit corridoron the fifth tier of stackswhere a million books breatheon shelves; here's a bookon neutrinos captured in Antarctica,here's another on solar flares.A curator displays a bookin Vai script and points to a trianglewith two dots; you wonderif you are looking at a pregnantwoman, an enslaved man,or a human ear; you pull a bookoff a shelf and, opening it,hear Del aire al aire, como "

"then snap it shut: the air humswith honeybees. A second curatorpoints at glittering gold script;though you can't divine a word,you guess Farsi and diveinto the marlin-blue depth of the page.A third curator shows you 心遠woodblock printed on mulberry paper,and as you read a distant mindleaves the earth around it,you smell daylilies in a courtyardand know you may caravanto Timbuktu, but there's nopear-blossom end to what's within reach."

A lit corridor on the fifth tier of stacks holds a million books that seem to breathe on shelves. Curators present volumes in diverse scripts—Vai, glittering gold script suggestive of Farsi, and a woodblock 心遠 on mulberry paper—each prompting different interpretations and sensory responses. A single turned page yields a Spanish phrase that momentarily fills the air with bees; another plunges the reader into marlin-blue depths; yet another evokes daylilies, courtyards, and imagined caravans to Timbuktu. The library becomes a portal where languages, images, scents, and histories converge, offering boundless discovery and travel of the mind.

Read at The New Yorker