A Library Without Books: The Epic of the City That Built a Golden Tomb for Memory

In the year the first word disappears, Truth vanishes from newspapers, books and old love letters, followed by Question, Memory and Freedom, while the city goes on living. Blueprints arrive in black envelopes with no architect's signature, for a library with a main hall as long as a street, shelves soaring toward interior domes and a central hall said to hold the Memory of the Nation, and a worker asks where the books will go. On opening day the ruler announces the age of knowledge beneath a statue holding a closed book, and the public enters marble halls with golden lamps and not a single book, while the polished shelves whisper at night asking for theirs. The librarian Yusuf finds countless titles listed in the system, each one marked in transit, and an old man arrives carrying his father's book like a sick child, only for the library to refuse it. The book ends with a beginning made of a few books and a reader, and with the thought that power can raise endless shelves but cannot command memory to inhabit them.