In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian.

In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.

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

Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.

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.

Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.

Existing libraries, in their very being, seem to question the authority of those in power.