ONEi surround myself with books, as i always have; this time, mostly borrowed given my parlous state ::chuckle:: in my early years: much the same, borrowed from libraries: the church library, the school, the USIS, the best friend’s family (they had means, his father a rising business owner) but, at one and one time only: stolen from a bookstore; i brought with me that Russian cap that dad had brought home from Princeton, the one with the thick and fluffy insides and the flap down both ears; and inside of which i stuffed a paperback {was it a Hardy Boys? a Le Carré? a Forsyth? a Michener? "My Name is Asher Lev"?}...

TWO...decades later, in Berkeley, where i would linger the longest {for the better part of a quarter century, from 1982 through 2007} I would line the walls of my apartments with bookshelves and, eventually, these midden planks would be home to thousands of volumes gathering: hands, dust, eyes, tongues, dreams. eventually, i would give them all away (that one biblio-apocalyptic weekend), when i went back home to Maui for good (which was not how it turned out but that’s another » for another day).

THREEand in all these books through all that time are to be found: tokens. the likelihood of their having been in the pretraining stream of these emergent entities: quite high… but what does this mean? will language itself have evolved to contain the mirrors of reason within it? who will it assay? where will the fields of consciousness play? why will it embrace the essence of being alive and at play in the fields of the assemblies, the humans, the gods, the demigods, the gandarvas? ::chuckle::

FOURbooks in the English language: yes. but, hardly incidentally, the letters would glance upon the inner ones: Hebrew, German, Japanese; as they would in turn be listening in on the outer ones: Ilokano, Visayan, Tagalog, Spanish; and would grow the eventual accreted ones: Russian, Hawaiian, HTML; and lean on (quite possibly) the last ones to appear, to be touched: Mutsun, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Persian, Homeric Greek.

FIVEwhen all is said and done, when the final flame from the guttering candle and its body of olden and vanishing wax will tremble and begin flickering out despite the plenitude of oxygen still surrounding it, what will these languages have meant to its fading, last-dreaming speaker and how will they appear to him. perhaps they will come to appear as sound itself, as tremor, as pulse, wave, or as a kind of light-shadow upon the looming stillness of things. the loving silliness of beings. yes, that... when all is said, and re•written.