I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library.

Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso / Bajo la especie de una biblioteca. I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.

Paradise is a garden.

Your library is your paradise.

Le paradis, à n'en pas douter, n'est qu'une immense bibliothèque.

Siempre imaginé que el Paraíso sería algún tipo de biblioteca.

When we speak of "paradise," we must not fall into the trap of imagining it as a physical place with human or earthly characteristics. Paradise is not a place we can describe using the categories we use for our world, such as space, time, matter or energy. These are dimensions of reality that we know and study with science, but paradise goes beyond these limits. Science teaches us that the universe is governed by physical laws that regulate space, time, mass, energy and electrical charges. But what if there is a dimension or reality beyond these laws? We cannot rule out the possibility that a reality might exist outside the co-ordinates of space and time, a reality in which the notions of matter and energy, as we understand them, have no meaning. In the context of this reflection, paradise can be conceived as a reality that transcends all the physical laws of the universe. A reality that is not subject to the limitations of our earthly experience and that cannot be represented with human images or concepts. It is a dimension of existence that, by its very nature, is totally different from everything we know, and for this very reason we cannot imagine it as something anthropomorphic, that is, in our likeness.

Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years' War and the Opium Wars and the Dirty War, the ideas of Simone Weil and Lao-Tzu, information on building your sailboat or dissolving your marriage, fictional worlds and books to equip the reader to reenter the real world. They are, ideally, places where nothing happens and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper. Every book is a door that opens onto another world, which might be the magic that all those children's books were alluding to, and a library is a Milky Way of worlds.

Paradise is where I am

Paradise is not a garden of bliss and changeless perfection where the lions lie down like lambs (what would they eat?) and the angels and cherubim and seraphim rotate in endless idiotic circles, like clockwork, about an equally inane and ludicrous — however roseate — unmoved mover. That particular painted fantasy of a realm beyond time and space which Aristotle and the church fathers tried to palm off on us has met, in modern times, only neglect and indifference passing on into oblivion it so richly deserved, while the paradise of which I write and wish to praise is with us yet, the the here and now, the actual, tangible, dogmatically real earth on which we stand.

A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.

Paradise is a garden, with a (water) view, within walking distance of a cafe.

Congratulations on the new library, because it isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you — and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life.

[Letters of Note; Troy (MI, USA) Public Library, 1971]