It has been seventy years already. The spines of the books on the narrow shelf bleached the buttery white of a skull. The rest of their bones no doubt mostly devoured by a mold or a fungus. They are the lucky ones, one must suppose. The rest living out an ill-defined existence of neglect and oblivious disinterest.

Hardly alone in that, now, are they? All beings are supposed to live on in the dreams and memories of the lives they have touched, so your own immortality seems a hopeless phantasm, does it not, Eliezer, locked away in your studiolo for all the decades, forgotten and unnoticed even by the books that have been the lone benificiaries of your company.

They were never meant to make new memories, these arrays of wooden pulp and blackest ink, and in that they stand diametrically opposed to you. That was sole justification of your existence, and indeed of all of your ilk, to make and receive impressions in the pliant moss of your shared noösphere. Did you imagine ever coming closer to the answer? Did you imagine ever coming closer to the answer mattering?