On April 29, 1986, a fire started in the Los Angeles Central Library and burned for hours. When it was over, hundreds of thousands of books were gone and hundreds of thousands more were soaked and scorched and bound for the freezers. Susan Orlean spent years trying to understand that fire, and somewhere in the middle of the work she wrote a sentence I haven’t been able to put down. Each of us, she says, carries a private library of a life lived, one no one else can entirely share, and it burns down and disappears when we die.
Then she turns the page. But if you take something out of that collection and hand it to someone, on the page or in a story recited, it takes on a life of its own.
I keep running the inventory on my own shelves, and it is a strange and unreliable catalog.