Train Car #5 contains: An Overdue Library Book

Yikes! Why do you still have Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi checked out? You’ve already read it three times, and you have your own copy. Bring this one back!

I guess Piranesi is just the kind of book that gets stuck in my head. In 2024, it usurped The Elegance of the Hedgehog as my favorite book of all time; I read it in just the course of an afternoon, hunched over its pages in the back of the lab while I was waiting for the spatial light modulator to finish its optimization.

It’s about a man who lives in a world consisting only of an infinite series of grand, empty halls filled with crumbling marble statues and sometimes oceans. If you’re into the fantastical worlds Italo Calvino creates in Invisible Cities, you might like this too. Page 5 reads:

“I am determined to explore as much of the World as I can in my lifetime. To this end… I have climbed up to the Upper Halls where Clouds move in slow procession and Statues appear suddenly out of the Mists. I have explored the Drowned Halls where the Dark Waters are carpeted with white water lilies. I have seen the Derelict Halls of the East where Ceilings, Floors–sometimes even Walls!–have collapsed and the dimness is split by shafts of grey Light.

In all these places I have stood in Doorways and looked ahead. I have never seen any indication that the World was coming to an End, but only the regular progression of Halls and Passageways into the Far Distance.

No Hall, no Vestibule, no Staircase, no Passage is without its Statues. In most Halls they cover all the available space, though here and there you will find an Empty Plinth, Niche or Apse, or even a blank space on a Wall otherwise encrusted with Statues. These Absences are as mysterious in their way as the Statues themselves.”

Mysterious! Compelling! But truth be told, I was already hooked by the two quotes on the very first page. The first:

"I am the great scholar, the magician, the adept, who is doing the experiment. Of course I need subjects to do it on." -The Magician's Nephew, C. S. Lewis

The Magician’s Nephew is an interesting entry into the Narnia series, a prequel written five years after the first book, following not the brave and noble Pevensie children of the main series but instead the magician’s nephew himself–a little boy who is no great scholar, magician, or adept, merely the subject. And yet this subject bears witness to the death of one world and the creation of another, perhaps one of the only coherent explanations for Narnia that C. S. Lewis ever feels compelled to supply.

And the second quote:

“People call me a philosopher or a scientist or an anthropologist. I am none of those things. I am an anamnesiologist. I study what has been forgotten. I divine what has disappeared utterly. I work with absences, with silences, with curious gaps between things. I am really more of a magician than anything else.” -Laurence Arne-Sayles, interview in The Secret Garden, May 1976

Piranesi is fundamentally a story about memory, and I’m nothing if not obsessed with the concept of memory. Which is a lifelong preoccupation, by the way–as a kid I used to hold my breath and whisper to myself “don’t forget don’t forget don’t forget”–leaving behind razor-sharp memories of instantaneous moments, climbing into the backseat of my dad’s car, running my finger along the floorboards in the living room of my childhood home, moments stuck in the past as soon as they happened because I was so afraid of forgetting them. Afraid of the past melting and dripping through my clenched fists, losing pieces of myself to the gentle anesthesia of time.

If you’re weird about memory–if you’ve ever read even just bits of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, if you buy madeleines from the bakery in your neighborhood whenever you’ve had an off week just to close your eyes and eat them in tiny bites in the sunlight and imagine the experience catapulting you back to when you still lived in California, back when you ate madeleines with lime-blossom tea in a sun-soaked classroom in the Humanities building with the fountains in the courtyard, the one that used to be an olive grove years before you ever got there, the one where you sat with your friends and made fun of this stupid, ridiculous new app that someone was trying to promote at your school and traded ideas on Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, if you were so enchanted by the idea of involuntary memory that you decided to create it for yourself on your own terms, if you ever sometimes feel that you might be the Angel of History himself looking back at the wreckage of time and everything that has been lost in horror–then Piranesi might be the book for you.

Anyways. Maybe someone will have returned their copy to the library. Maybe it’s waiting for you.