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Sample text

Perhaps some time in the future, when physical books have become obsolete, those miles of underground passages beneath the Bodleian can be sold off as crypts to wealthy Oxford alumni, who might well fancy the notion of spending eternity in the stacks. In the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, the jackal-headed god Anubis escorts the spirit of the deceased down its sacred path to the underworld. In certain accounts of near-death experiences, collected at the Web site Near Death, this journey includes a visit to a heavenly structure with wide halls and curving staircases that closely resembles a library, whose rooms are lined with books containing all the knowledge of the universe: I was in a vast old traditional building, containing all the wisdom of the ages, everything ever said or written.

Perhaps it’s true that things might have been different if, instead of the novels of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, I’d read books in which readers DON’T come off so well. I didn’t heed the cautionary tale of Miniver Cheevy, but I could have learned a lot from Don Quixote, whose absorption in chivalric romances drives him mad. I should have paid attention to the way Emma Bovary destroys her life by reading the way I was reading, without taste, discrimination, or a flicker of higher thought.

But to get away from myself, to disappear entirely. If I had to read about familiar experiences, I wanted them to be distorted beyond recognition, twisted into terrible nightmares with dead bodies and rats. Miserable shop girls, tame kestrels, and unplanned pregnancies weren’t enough. I’d always loved Edward Arlington Robinson’s poem “Miniver Cheevy,” from his collection The Town Down the River. ” Miniver, who loves Art, Romance, and other abstractions, spends his days dreaming of the glorious and romantic past: Miniver cursed the commonplace, And eyed a khaki suit with loathing; He missed the medieval grace Of iron clothing.

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