A rickety old fella makes the rounds of a library or archive of some sort. Let’s call it a storage area for the collected works of an obscure poet-philosopher, along with the books and other detritus he accumulated in a lifetime. It’s the old fella’s job to catalog it all, but he keeps getting caught up reading this book or that, or while trying to determine the contents of a disc he finds himself reading the ancient texts contained therein.

Therefore he is years behind in his cataloging duties. Oddly, no one asks him to account for his time, and after awhile he begins to think that the world has forgotten not only about the obscure poet-philosopher but also about him, the cataloguer/archivist.

One day an enthusiastic fan appears at his doorstep, eager to learn all she can about the obscure poet-philosopher’s most obscure works and inspirations. “Where did he get the idea for that brilliant story he wrote that was universally ignored?”

“How do you even know about that story?”

“Yes, well, like I said, I’ve read everything he ever published,” she says.

They stand in the cluttered room that represents the poet-philosopher’s accumulated inspirations, and the rickety old fella gives a little laugh.

“It’s kind of mind-boggling how much work went into each and every one of these things,” he says. “Look at the thousands of names listed at the end of a single movie, each of the names representing a person who invested a certain amount of time to help create the story we’ve just seen. 

“Such an undertaking begins with the germ of an idea, but a community rises around the idea and generates a production of epic proportions. The human endeavor in a five-inch disc — hours and days and weeks and months and often years of effort forged into a trinket you can hold in your hand, but properly activated by the appropriate electronic player, a story comes alive to capture your attention for one or two hours or so.”

“It’s kind of true,” the fan says.

“Even a book that contains one story created by one person represents a lifetime of preludes and experiences with thousands of other people, and at least a few dozen people were involved with bringing the germ of an idea from the author’s mind and into your hands.

“I walk through these rooms where it’s all stored, all these lifetimes of creative energy ready and waiting to be absorbed into other humans. There’s a story to be told about each object, and I could take another lifetime to tell all of those stories.”

The cataloguer looks at the eager fan, as if seeing her again for the first time, and shrugs.

“So I’d best get on with it,” he says, and he picks up the object nearest to his hand, a book by a writer who wrote pulp fiction who flourished in the 1930s and 1940s. He also wrote a handful of novels, and this is one of those.

“Was it any good?” asks the eager fan.

“I don’t know. I’ve never read it,” the archivist says.

“Well, thanks for your time and for letting me see all of this,” she says. He sees her to the door and turns back to the shelves and boxes of the poet-philosopher’s holdings, still clutching the pulp fiction writer’s novel.

He sits down to read. After a few minutes he looks around at the room full of human life condensed into objects.

“My goodness,” he says to no one in particular. “This is going to take a while.”