united into a mass

Max was having another manic-depressive spell. So he did what he always did. He went on a reading frenzy.

Reading was the only thing that could occupy his mind more than depression could. The floor of his apartment was a landscape of paperbacks, with books piled into mountains that were barely passable. He had long ago realized he couldn’t keep buying them. So he had started going to the library.

Tracking down specific topics was too much of a hassle. He found it much more productive to just walk to a shelf and grab a book at random. He particularly enjoyed obscure books that no one ever read. The more dust it had on it, the better. The content didn’t matter. Authors had spent many hours of their lives laboring to put the words of these books together, only to go largely unnoticed by the human population. Max read books on geomorphology and glaciology. He read cliché detective stories from the 1930s. He read about the early kings of Norway. He read predictable romance novels. He read about state capitalism and working-class radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry. It made him feel like he was serving a purpose, making sure that the work of these authors did not pass into oblivion.

But this morning, as he walked on the third basement level between the canyons of bookshelves, fingers running along the bindings, he didn’t get the urge to stop and pick one of them up. All those books, all of that information…what good was it? How could these billions and billions of ignored words impact the world?

Max sat down at an empty table (they were all empty down here) and felt misery building like a wave. He was more depressed now than when he came into the library. He had to do something. Out of desperation, he opened the massive dictionary on the table in front of him and began to read.

He continued for hours without stopping. Letters came and went. The only sound he heard was the snap of him turning a page at regular intervals. He focused on the words, frantically trying to push everything else out of his thoughts. But question kept creeping in: How could any of the tiny, random bits of information humans spent their lives accumulating amount to anything significant?

He was growing tired. It was late. The lights of the library flashed on and off several times, the warning that the building would be closing soon. Max kept reading. The lines started to blur. He felt his vision collapsing, his head inclining downwards. It was at the bottom of the page that he found an answer, resigning himself to the idea that metaphor is more important than meaning.