The Library of Time

Parker Posey learning the Dewey Decimal system in Daisy von Scherler Mayer's film Party Girl (1995)

Space, it’s now thought, is the library of time,

Its shelves, an infinite archive of everything,

In whose dark matter stacks are corrigenda

To repair, prior to their repetition, scenes

Assigned to countless deities—aujourd'hui,

To quantum jockeys’ accelerating mercies:

Gods, or monkeys, struggling to remember

The faces they, before born, possessed.

Call no man happy till he’s dead and shelved,

Word was anciently; I'd hoped myself to be

Carried home like a hoplite on my shield.

But Entanglement remains a mystery.

Unborn, we "lead apes in hell," Erwin realized.*

Gadzooks! † And now to be Dewey Decimalized!

* First found in George Gascoigne's A Hundreth sundrie Flowres bounde vp in one small Poesie (1573), this expression (metaphor for a virgin's fate in her afterlife) was plagiarized by Shakespeare in The Taming of the Shrew (ca. 1591) and Much Ado About Nothing (ca. 1599).

"Erwin" is the Austrian-Irish physicist Erwin Schrödinger, inventor of the famous thought experiment involving a cat that is simultaneously alive and dead.

† The archaic exclamation "Gadzooks!" is apparently a corruption of "God's Hooks!"—i.e., the nails of Jesus' Crucification.

Juneteenth 2025