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Without the Library’s steady guidance, this device would allow the uncontrollable spread not only of knowledge, but folly. Imagine a world in which anyone, anywhere, could create and distribute their own words, however ignorant or flawed!
You’re more like some Scholar. You have ink in your blood, boy, and no help for it. Books will never be just a business to you.’ ‘I’ve never failed to do what you asked,’ Jess said. ‘And I never asked anything of you that I didn’t think you could do. If I told you to throw that book you’re smuggling under your shirt on the fire, you’d fail me in that, sure enough.’ Jess’s hands clenched hard, and he had to work not to shout his answer. ‘I’m not a bloody Burner.’
The stars would be different, where he was going. But the moon would be the same.
‘You’re clever, Jess, but Da’s wrong about one thing: you don’t just have ink in your blood. It’s in your bones. Your skeleton’s black with it. You go there, to them, and we’ll lose you for ever.’
There are three parts to learning: information, knowledge, and wisdom. A mere accumulation of information is not knowledge, and a treasure of knowledge is not in itself, wisdom.
The Library might have brought the wisdom of ages into the lives of the common folk; they might have kept humankind from falling into the darkness of ignorance and despair and superstition. But that didn’t mean their hands were clean.
He’d said she made him careless. Funny word. Careless. It wasn’t true. He cared so much more than he’d ever thought he could.
What would that be like, to have that single, unshakeable faith in the world, to not see all the shadows?
‘Wolfe recognised that the Library had stopped moving forward about two hundred years ago. It wasn’t changing. It couldn’t, because it needed Obscurists to do its work, and as fewer were found, it had to hold tighter to each one. And then squeeze. And then strangle.’
Do you know what happens when the world shakes, Thomas? Cities fall. People are crushed. Empires break. The very foundations of the Library shatter.
