A Founding Myth

Had he been one for listening, we might have persuaded the Creator to keep things simple. Already there existed a system, a Light in the Darkness, brought forth from indeterminate Chaos and present in the sensuous Truth established by the Library of Congress. What pride was there in a hope for transparency? This, in beautifully concrete symmetry, was ὁ λόγος. In that time outside of Time, Nature had no independent form, for Joseph Regenstein's library itself was the Form of Nature. Beyond Time, inside of Time, at various points in the ether quite over Time, JRL and its abstract manifestation, LOC, carved into the Formlessness its own Perfect Form. And the Library's board saw that it was good, and it was proposed that in this image Man should be made.

Still the Creator balked: "This is not meant for Man, nor is it meant for Her Whom I Have Not Yet Named. The Man I must create has yet the Finite to traverse, and here you ask that I provide him with the Infinite while still in his infancy. Alliteration, also, is not for Man. I digress. I shall install within him a mechanism much like what you have designed here. I shall call it Libido...no, uh, I believe rather--I shall call it Memory! And Man shall have access to Knowledge, and he will encode this Knowledge and maintain it among like articles of Knowledge, and his Library of Knowledge will grow, until the University's budget can no longer support an additional automated retrieval system, at which point, well...hmmm...I'm still working out the details. But in addition, by virtue of his participation in the realm of Finite things, Man will be witness to Decay, and for your temerity tonight [by which he intended the Eternity which had passed before that first awful Monday], I shall see that the same principle of Decay applies to your books. Spines will crack, pages will disappear, and you will misplace many years of Congressional records from what I will, according to my nature, describe mysteriously as the Y-4's. Anyway, kids, Daddy's gotta bounce." And with that he cast us, along with Books III and IV of Aristotle's Physics, into the B-level, to wither in remorse for our untimely audacity...