hinery is being set in motion. While it is being set in motion, he
sits down before the wall on one of the seats or pews where a large
audience of other comfortless and lonely-looking people are. He feels
the great, heartless building gathering itself together, going after
John Milton for him, while he sits and waits. One after the other he
hears human beings' names being called out in space, and one by one poor
scared-looking people who seem to be ashamed to go with their
names--most of them--step up before the audience. He sees a book being
swung out to them, watches them slink gratefully away, and finally his
own name echoing about among the Immortals, startles its way down to
him. Then he steps up to the wall again, and John Milton at last, as on
some huge transcendental derrick belonging to the city of ----, is swung
into his arms. He feels of the outside gropingly--takes it home. If he
can get John Milton to come to life again after all this, he communes
with him. In two weeks he takes him back. Then the derrick again."

The only kind of book that I ever feel close to, in the average library,
is a book on war. Even if I go in, in a gentle, harmless, happy, singing
sort of way, thinking I want a volume of pastoral poems, by the time I
get it, I wish it were something that could be loaded, or that would go
off. As for asking for a book and reading it in cold blood right in the
middle of such a place, it will always be beyond me. I have never found
a book I could do it with yet. However I struggle to follow the train of
thought in it, it's a fuse. I find myself breaking out, when I see all
these far-away-looking people coming up in rows to their faraway books.
"A library," I say to myself, "is a huge barbaric, mediaeval institution,
where behind stone and glass a man's dearest friends in the world, the
familiars of his life, lie helpless in their cells. It is the
Penitentiary of Immortals. There are certain visiting days when friends
and relatives are allowed to come, but it only--" At this point a gong
sounds and tells me to go home. "Are not books bone of a man's bone, and
flesh of his flesh? Oughtn't they to be? Shall a man ask permission to
see his wife? Why should I fill out a slip to a pretty girl, when I want
to be in Greece with Homer, or go to hell with Dante? Why should I write
on a piece of paper, 'I promise to return--infinity--by six o'clock'? A
library is a huge machine for keeping the letter with books a