"Maybe I'll go wild too and dance among the books to the sound of drums, maybe my face at the end of a passage will scare a lady librarian, but it's too late to turn back now. I must go on. I have got too close to the frontiers of the other city; what wafted from there was enough to undermine the last remnants of the network of customs into whose fabric our entire behavior is woven: without that support, the simplest of actions disintegrate into dozens of separate operations, each of which must be built up separately from the foundations out of nothing and then matched up with the rest; one must consider the thousands of possible relationships that arise thereby, so that lunch in a restaurant or shopping become something akin to the labors of Hercules. I must go on towards the other city; the old order will not bear any more patching; it was always full of holes through which shone the pulsations of primordial currents of some kind. And everything indicates that those currents flow from the other city and my hope is that in its center I will discover the spring that is the source of our order and which alone can renew it. It can't be helped, I must go into the library. I don't know what monsters I shall encounter but I think it will not be any more terrible than life in my own city. And besides, I have prepared myself well for the journey." I opened my rucksack and showed him my stock of food, taking out my torch and brandishing my machete above my head.
The researcher sighed. "All right, if you're incapable of lunching in a restaurant, I will lead you into the library."
--Michael Ajvaz, The Other City, 146.
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