The Overdue Library Book

One night when I was about 10, I dreamt I was in a library.

A lady walked up. She looked familiar. She didn’t say anything but when she turned and walked away, I felt compelled to follow.

We came to a large set of double doors. Inscribed on them were the words Sapere aude, and caveat scriptor.

She looked at me but all I could do was shrug.

“It’s OK, you’ll remember soon enough,” she said, pushed gently on one of the doors and we went inside to an office. She sat down behind a desk. I remained standing. Scared.

“You’re early,” she said, “why are you so early?”

The fear that her words induced was so great I woke up and sat up in bed, startled and shaking.

Four years later I started 9th grade. The first thing the new English teacher did was write on the board: Sapere aude.

“Does anyone know what that means?” she asked the class.

Somehow, I knew! Shakily, I spoke up. Not because I knew I had the right answer but because it was love at first sight for me with Miss Colwell.

“Dare to know,” I said.

She was quiet, a surprised look crossing her face before a tender smile and the reply, “Very good. I hope you continue to dare Mr. Calloway.”

That very night I dreamt of the library. And her.

She was the dream librarian!

“Can I help you?” she said, walking up to me as I stood browsing the fiction section.

“Miss Colwell?”

“You are a good student.”

And with those words, we were suddenly on the roof of the building. A change of scene the way they commonly happen in dreams; sudden, inexplicable.

We were standing at the edge. A tightrope was strung to the next building. Cloud cover obscured whatever was below, but the feeling of immense height was undeniable.

“Do you remember when we first met in the library? You were younger. Less jaded. You checked out a book that night,” she said.

“I don’t remember,” I said, squinting against the wind whipping across my face. Yet not a hair on her head moved.

“You will. It’s the one that hasn’t been written yet.”

“Excuse me?”

“You have to write it—on earth. It’s overdue now.”

“What does that have to do with a tightrope?”

“The wire between the lower and higher worlds is how you dare to know. But don’t forget the other part- caveat scriptor -writer beware.”

And then I woke up.

Our next meeting wasn’t until eight years later when I was wide awake, standing on a sidewalk in Prescott, Arizona watching the rental house my girlfriend and I had been living in go up in flames.

There she was, standing right next to me. My girlfriend couldn’t hear or see her.

“I know all your writings of the past fifteen years or so are on paper in that burning house right now. Your life was saved by that off duty cop who just happened to smell smoke as he was driving by. You and your girlfriend are alive. You realize whatever you’ve written up to this point is insignificant compared to that, right?”

“Oh, I do, I really do. It would be nice if they could be saved but if not, I’m ok with letting them all go and starting over.”

She smiled the way she did when I gave the right answer in class. I didn’t have to start over.

Sometime later we met again.

“You didn’t have to set the house on fire to get my attention,” I said.

“Oh, I’m afraid I did. Got you sober, didn’t it? You could never walk the wire drunk or stoned. C’mon, they’re waiting, follow me.”

We walked down a long hall which ended where she opened the door to a huge, crowded auditorium. I had the strong sense an interesting presentation of some sort was about to begin. Perhaps an erudite academic of some esoteric philosophy, or spiritual teacher.

I took an empty seat in the back of the room, but Miss Colwell grabbed my arm.

“What are you doing sitting down? You have to convince everyone in the audience to walk the wire with you. You have to finally, and fully, convince yourself it’s worth the risk.”

I was as scared as I had been when I was ten and first dreamed of her. But I was also as certain as I had been when I knew the translation of Sapere aude in class. In her eyes the wisdom of a thousand libraries were transmitted and I knew I could tap into it in now in just the right amounts needed.

I walked to the podium knowing, instinctively, I was the audience.

Sitting in no particular order were: Neolithic hunters, Neolithic gatherers, Roman senators, Roman slaves, medieval barons, medieval serfs, Japanese samurai, Japanese courtesans, bankers, musicians, merchants, madmen, monks, businessmen, philosophers professors, poets, popes, preachers, pedophiles, alcoholics, addicts, gamblers, thieves, murderers, merchants, martyrs, hermits, hoboes, housewives, soldiers, sailors, seamstresses, farmers, carpenters, brick masons, fishermen, lawyers, doctors, priests, dancers, wrestlers, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, the aged and stillborn.

I knew they were all teachers and all students, comprising a mosaic, a maze, a repeating, ascending cycle of individual endeavors each trying a new role, a new scene, a new costume, a new play that might lead to a final, definitive answer as to which would be best.

I looked down at Miss Colwell in the front row. I knew what to say. “Personalities are like vines growing entangled over the same tree. Over time they forget it is the tree that is the real truth and source of life. And, once we disentangle, we become free. That golden cup awaits across an abyss of forgetting; the one we have all so often fallen into in the past. It’s an opportunity to walk with full awareness of purpose into an experience without having to kill or be killed or starve or freeze to death or just live a humdrum life and take that final breath wondering what it was all about.”

“Wait a minute, sonny,” an older African American man spoke up. “What if we go with you and you’re wrong; there are no answers, there is no freedom? I know you’re a reincarnation of my miserable slave life on the plantation, and while I don’t mind being you now, despite being a little boring, I wouldn’t want to risk it for some pie in the sky.”

Then, a corpulent, red-faced, jolly-looking gentleman called out, “I daresay it’s just another gamble, another turn of the cards. I for one am feeling rather lucky at the moment and propose we give this well-spoken young lad the benefit of the doubt. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, wot?”

I remembered him/me-then. I was a happy-go-lucky alcoholic, gambler, carouser, running away from working in my dad’s saddlery shop in London but always coming back long enough for a loan from my mom or to work enough to head back for another party.

A regally dressed Asian woman then stood and said, “I must respectfully decline. I, an empress, taking advice from an unemployed housepainter?”

Sitting next to her, a tall man stood and said, “I have to say, in my position as Emperor of China, I, too am reluctant to give up the bird in the hand; by which I mean unlimited power, wealth, privilege and concubines, for two invisible ones in some spiritually nebulous bush.”

“Oh, my goodness,” we all heard then from somewhere in the back of the room. “So many lifetimes as slaves of one sort or another, both rich and poor, both enslaving others and being enslaved!”

Then he came forward in his 16th century attire and continued. “I beg all of you to accept this opportunity to move on! Was I burned at the stake for publishing a book contradicting the prevailing jackass wisdom of the time for nothing? Yes, many of us had sweet cushy, lives, dying in our sleep but then returning to a most rude awakening! Don’t you see what he says is true! This is our chance to get off this merry go round!”

An ethereal silence descended upon the room, and with it the golden light of a precious autumnal afternoon. And then came the sound. The sound that had been leading us to be together here across centuries, millennia, continents, oceans, planets and galaxies for that matter, through war, peace, poverty, prosperity, community and isolation, leadership and servitude, freedom and slavery, any and every state of being that could be manifested.

A murmuration—an effortless but exact swirling, shape-shifting coordination of starlings at dusk—painted the sky above a yin-yang light and dark. Shape and substance and silence and sound all became one expression of the ecstasy of existence. An expression arising and ascending out of all constraints and restraints to coalesce into something far too impossibly grand and timeless to squeeze into one flesh and blood body.

But the connective conduit to that vastness was ever open and flowing with precise dispensation into the essential, lost but never forgotten, eternal and inviolable truth of all.

We all began filing from the room to the stairway to the roof, moving quietly and harmoniously as monks, but also, as prisoners now to be released unconditionally. I was the last to the roof where Miss Colwell took my hand.

The energy flowing from her pulsed wildly into my body. And then she spoke so sweetly. “Continue to allow pieces of the cosmically large puzzle to slowly fit themselves into place. The pieces are your words. Writers can only do their best to toss out messages in bottles upon the waves of the mass consciousness. The most outwardly successful ones worked, consciously or unconsciously, with assistance from the library editors. They built upon what had been built already by the previous, invisible builders. Feel free to become a bestseller. However, the clock will keep ticking on that human form of yours, so you will need to start walking across now. Once you reach the other side is where the book will be written, the one that will then need to be returned.”

“There won’t be a late fee will there?” I asked, trying to make a joke, but actually once more rather worried after so recent a flush of uber-confidence.

A deep, sonorous voice from midway back in the line was then heard to say, “Good God Calloway, will you start walking and stop worrying already! We conquered the known world once and now you’re fretting about late fees!”

I looked back but could not see who had spoken. Miss Colwell grinned a little and said to me, “no, not Alexander the Great. One of his lieutenants, but with a greater ego than his boss, even. Don’t worry, you won’t be late. Ready?”

And she handed me a balancing pole.

As I took it, I was surprised at how light it felt and then took the first step. I couldn’t see anything below, but the strong sense of immense distance was undeniable. But there was no fear because my feet felt stuck to the wire with each step until I lifted one, and then the other, each locking onto the wire with perfect balance and security.

My upper body meanwhile felt like it was harnessed to a safety line extending upward into invisibility. After just a few steps I knew with certainty I was going to make it, there was no doubt, it was preordained, it was a fixed truth. And when I reached the midpoint, I confidently turned around to see the other selves. As each took that first step onto the wire, they disappeared. I turned back and walked on to the building across the abyss.

I had a book to return. Maybe more than one.

About David Clear: “I am a New England writer; plainly a hobbyist rather than a professional. I had no formal writing education, but many great writing teachers, from office jobs to heartbroken relationships, and even convenience store clerks. I am retired, and I guess still seeking my great writing whale. My novel, Dreaming at the Speed of Sound, is available on Amazon at this link.”

Image created by Krin Van Tatenhove using Midjourney AI