I love pictures of libraries stacked with books. Especially big libraries.

I love

• the regularity of the arrangement of volumes
• the desperate and constant reigning into order of their slightly less regular shapes (by shelves)
• the knowledge that inside each one is yet another, rougher, feigned neatness that has been squeezed first from the head of a person who has made to himself or herself sense of the world
• and behind it all, at the beginning, all the raw, jumbled ways things are.

And after all these layers of interpretation and categorising and cataloguing, we have an enormous, incomprehensibly comprehensive list of perceived or imagined states of affairs, almost as bizarre as our starting point, overwhelming, but navigable by its artifice. Then we take a snapshot.

When future generations ask about the old libraries, people will have to say:

"like information, built."