But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.

Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.

In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond.

I wanted to live among books.

Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.

I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.

And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder, as if someone or something had 'walked over our grave,' as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us - the recognition of something we never knew was there, or of something we vaguely felt as a flicker or a shadow, whose ghostly form rises and passes back into us before we can see what it is, leaving us older and wiser.