I once read a story about a poet at the end of the world. It wasn’t a Borges story, but it reminded me of something Borges probably dreamed. Most of civilization had perished in an unexplained catastrophe. A few brave souls had gone to great lengths to collect every monument to human civilization, with a few, regrettable, exceptions. But even these brave souls had perished, and now there was only one person left, an old poet who made his way to this great museum of human information. The museum had six hallways. They fed into a central atrium like the spokes of the wheel. Once, the atrium had been a high, gilded dome, modeled after St. Peter’s, but as the world faltered, holes had worn in the rotunda, birds had taken roost, and their shit had covered even the most beautiful frescoes.

In the story, this poet would walk the halls for days on end. There was the Madonna, and the Adoration of the Magi. There were van Gogh’s flowering apricots, and concentric ripples of Narcissus’ pool.

One day, in the story, the poet came upon Venus. She admired herself in an ornate gold plated mirror, swiveling her fair head left, then right. She was nude, her skin alabaster, her breasts small and pert, her stomach round with health, her thighs hale and dimpled, her cunt bare and pink. It had been many years since the poet had seen another human, let alone a woman. He moved behind her and slid his hands across her hips, feeling her body quiver with sensation, and then acquiescence. He cupped her pouched, plump stomach. She presented her neck to be kissed. He bit her ear lobe. He was supporting the full weight of her body. She crumpled into him. With a finger, he turned her chin and kissed her.

She led him into one of the hallways. He couldn’t see its end. On one wall, to his left, were paintings and statues and tapestries. The Fall of Constantinople. The Swimmers of Cabo de Gata. Christ the Onanistic. The Violation of Helen. The Massacre of the Innocents. Aphrodite’s Transept. The Oasis of the Sahara. Dusk over the 16^th at Cypress Point. The Liberation of Buchenwald. The Spring of Saint Catherine Boils with Blood.

To his right were towering Gothic arches, plated with the skulls of popes and emperors. Beyond was a teeming port at sun fall. Immense pyres burned the horizon. The tower of Babel and the Lighthouse of Alexandria crowned the skyline. The hollow belfries of Notre Dame greeted phantom travelers.

“I once tried to walk to the end of just one hall,” Venus said. “I walked for years and years. My heart eventually grew weary of so much beauty. I yearned for the hideous. Eventually I turned for home, defeated.”

“Why didn’t you just jump into the sea?”

“I was afraid. So I continued to walk. And now I sit all day with my mirror.”

“Why not try again? To reach the end of just one hall? If you reach it’s end, perhaps you’ll try to reach the end of another.”

“I think about it sometimes, but it’s such an exhausting thought. And if I reach the end of all the hallways, what then will I do?”

“Look in your mirror, like you do now.”

“Yes, but then I’d be confined to looking in my mirror. Now I choose to.”

He was no longer looking at the paintings and he was ignoring the statues. He was devoted to the varicose skin behind her knees, to the twin indentations of her lower back. He marveled at her pubic stubble and the folds of skin above her ribs.

She led him to the entrance of the catacombs of literature.

“How long do they extend?” he asked.

“No one who has ever entered has come back.”

“So other men have come before me?” he asked.

Venus shrugged.

“Is my poetry in there?”

Again she shrugged. “I don’t think anyone has ever gone looking for your work.”

He lingered on the threshold. It was abraded by passage. She looked at him with melancholy.

“If you go in there, I will not see you again. Be wary. You will encounter the corpses of those who have gone before you. Some of them are probably still alive, but they will be hideous by now, more subterranean specter than man. Some of them will follow you, singing an awful dirge. You will have to endure it’ or kill them. Eventually, you will start to sing it yourself. Initially, you’ll hum its first few bars, before catching yourself. But soon its words will be the only words you can remember.”

“But it’s possible that my books are in there?”

She put her hand on his cock. Then he walked away from her into the catacombs.

Inside were all the old Summerian texts, and the Assyrian texts, the languages long dead, though he would sometimes study the figures and try to discern something human and ineffable in them. There were all the old troubador ballads, Shakespeare’s plays, endless labyrinths of poetry (most of it bad), and the penny Victorian novels, the adventure novels inspired by America’s westward march, and the pulp serials of the great depression. There were so many options that the old man was overwhelmed, so mostly he just wandered, tracing the spines of the books with his hands, or picking up a book to read a line or two. The thought of finding his few meager volumes of poetry amongst such a proliferation overwhelmed him. Eventually, he sat down and began singing.

The story was written in the late fifties. It was fantastical, yes, but the concept of humanity’s information being tangible, and thus collectable, was vaguely believable. It stretched the limits of possibility, but not the laws of reality. Now, I think, such a story would be brushed off as archaic. What would such a museum look like today? Would it be an underground warehouse with millions of servers, all of them aligned in neat rows, all of them identical with their flashing lights and their wires?

But then, we keep our private libraries, still. Mine is in a closet in my parent’s house in Philadelphia. It contains all my tickets from movies and baseball games, all the receipts from dates I’ve gone on, all the boarding passes and bus tickets and metro cards from my travels. Most of them have faded already, or eroded. And besides, if someone were to come across these artifatcs, would they mean any more to them than Sumerian would?