The athenaeum of you
An excursion into the emic object of self.
And in the end, there shall be light.
Antre
It is so dark you feel unable to tell tales of features of the surroundings. The floor feels amorphous and the walls could be sole schemes. There is a drive somewhere deep in you nudging your foot forward further into the ambiguity of nothingness and your instincts restrain from objection.
Knowing nothing you commence to pass through the void; It feels cold though even with the dark surprisingly not wreathing, maybe even known like a gloomy winter day. As you progress, like the cycle of night and day, you start to be able to tell that you are in a narrow, mineshaft-like tunnel, through which only few rays of light lambently seek to sliver their path through to your eye, amidst the ever present dust that fills the air uncomfortably. It is the only annoyance to feel, causing the dry cough and the urge to rub the rheum ceaselessly.
You come to a full stop as you approach an old rusted metal door and steadily turn its worn out handle. Hefty creaking accompanies the stepping opening of the way. As the path widens enough for you to see through slits, a shocking pain incidents in the back of your head. Incredibly bright light finds it ways through slight creases in the metal, refracting and reflecting and giving no consistent picture but light to your to the darkness adjusted pupils.
The Athenaeum
You enter a grand chamber opening up before your eyes as the dust slowly settles on the floor. You look down and solely see what seemed to actively foster annoyance, sparkling and shimmering, just laying there, anhedonic and merely there; That realisation startles you for a second, as though there would be differences in attributing meaning to experiences and things, but now you understand the dynamics of change in the origin of subjectiveness. The room has a warm feel to its atmosphere, in which every single ray of light is glowing seemingly abnormally, filling the room in a golden bloom. Your imagination creates a painting of sublime strokes and saturated colours where an angelic choir pushes the bare truth out of their lungs and fills every volumetric yard of the room with it. Accompanied by heavenly harps and a single, lonely seeming violin, the sounds of the voices seem ethereal and sacrilege to you.
Descending down just a few steps ahead is a purpure coloured rug covering a comfortably to take staircase. You cannot really see into the sides of the room without making the descend, but the steps clearly mark the entrance as a separate part of the room, as if the room would only start to open up and show you it’s contents once fully entered. Keeping your view glued to the floor, you take steps towards the ledge of the first step, it makes you feel special somehow, as if this entrance was made for you. You start your descend, firmly grabbing on to the left handrail, providing you stability while stepping.
As you look up, your gaze doesn’t matter of what’s in front, but quickly fixates on the ceiling. A silver lined, glass tiled plafond makes way for the outside to reach inside and fill our presence with what we need for us to see what is right in front of us. The ornately decorated gold floor reflects the light and makes it seem rather special. A feeling of warmth and happiness overcomes you as your eyes get blinded while trying to make out the fine, embellishing embroidery from afar. You have to close your eyes and could only really make out a pattern, originating from the center of the room, that extends outwards in a fractal-like matter, yet leading to the ends of the stairway and you think that there has to be meaning behind its form.
Arrived at the bottom of the stairs, the room itself is visible to you. It contains a walkway in the middle, right in front of you, extending the full length, while to the left and to the right there are rows of bookshelves as big as you could have never seen before. You grasp the scale of the room and for the first time question the actuality of your experiences. ‘two skyscrapers left and right, laying on their sides’ is probably in postmodern society the common term closest to approaching describing the sheer size. There are no labels or signs giving meaning to the arrangement of the books on the shelves, which seems odd to you.
Aisle of papyrus
You pick up one of the books in one of the first rows, inspect it visually and feel it with your hands. It looks old like the rusted metal door, has bright spots in its faded leather binding and feels rough. You’re thinking, about how freshly bound leather would feel smooth, look dull and have consistent dark brown color. You seem perplexed by why you know about bookbinding, but leave it at that and open up the book right in the middle.
There are symbols or letters or numbers, but honestly, for some reason you can’t tell. You flip the pages to see if there’s any difference or if all pages seem the same, as if you’d expect figures or pictures, but they are all filled with such symbols. You know what they mean or what they represent but you think its not to be put into simple words with timely context. You stop flipping the pages for a second, because now you understand. The books on the shelves, on all these, thousands or millions of shelves, they are all that you know. Not everything you know you clearly distinguish though, as that could simply be expressed in human terms and vocabulary.
All You know is what makes you you with and without everything that you know. Explaining could be approached with the question of whether or not you are who you are because of your memories and solely your experiences or if you are you because of an inner kernel of you, whether or not that kernel is affected by experiences, which are caused by time in relation and terms of you.
You think that there’s no point in continuing to look further at the books and slide the one you have in your hands slowly back into the shelve. While doing so, you can’t stop your gaze from staying on your hand that is putting the book on the shelve and start to wonder why all these books are here. You walk a little further into the room and take a closer look at the goldwork decoration on the floor. You wonder how the floor could be in such good condition while the books weren’t. Much walking on the floor would quickly make the beautiful gold floor unreflective and rather matte looking. You think that that’s very much similar to how in public transportation, where there is metal on the floor, its always roughened up. So you think, that there must somehow not have been many people here to walk through these aisles, which is maybe related to the door and tunnel leading to it. You wonder whether there has been anyone at all and who built this place in the first place.
To be continued..
– Stellar Explorer on the odyssey through space.
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