For them, the highest attainment lower than God Himself was culture, the practice of art, its appreciation, its love, which is inspiration, the life of the mind. And so prayers were thought with the hands then written down with the tongue and were bound up into piles known to us even now as books, which are heaps of words of letters of the unknown, which were widely read and even more enthusiastically discussed by all regardless of any condition save death, as twice every week and a third time upon the Sabbath they would flock not like dark sheep but like sheepish wolves to the marketplace, the synagogue, the risen Temple that is the perfected, sanctified, if also wholly metaphorical space that even if infinite can never contain the impulse of prayer, and there would read to each other aloud the words and the Word, too, in every language they understood and in any of them about God’s deeds, about each other and their deeds, and verily people would come to bind their wisdom between these two covers of parchment, between two of them like life and death, like air and like sea, the waters above and those below as stripped from the flesh of animals who are known to be the sworn enemies of art, then how they’d bring these books of theirs in vast teeming pilgrimages to the proverbial center of the world, only to pile them again in loose heaps every night arranged into the order most newly revealing by angels in glasses known to the assembled as Rose, Pearl, and Miss Sandy Glassman, Librarian; then, to erect a roof over this pile that was to be known as the sky and walls that were to be felt as the wind, and that within this enormity they had heaped atop the stone of the foundation of the earth, which is a petrified word, unutterable, rocky upon the tongue the last name of God that silences verb, they could all come and go as they pleased, and not just three days taxed a week or just on the Sabbath but whenever convenient, and there they could find out, they could know and even avail themselves of the opportunity to approach understanding. And in the annex of this universe known as America a mensch had arisen who was also named Benjamin, who had brought down to us the secret of glasses and that of the electricity that courses as blood through our veins — and verily he had once called such an institution a Library, and so it was and was so very good that walls of marble had to be erected within the wind, and then a roof, too, had to be set as firm as marble, there under the fundament of sky because so many people had wanted in and all of them at once needing their knowledge that it had become impossible to accommodate all.
