A personal library is not a collection of odd volumes: It is the outward representation of one's inner life, a mirror of the soul, the past spread out before your eyes. To pass from book to book to book is to abolish time, to connect the child rapt before the wonders of Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire with the middle-aged man puzzled about the cosmology of Plato's Timaeus. They are one. A line of poetry can lead you through half a library and most of a life. A random note may generate an entire symphony. For a real reader to do without a personal library would be like throwing away a time machine, like waking up an amnesiac, like ceasing to dream.     

                          ---  Michael Dirda