Books, however, are just one part of a library. A proper library has at least one fantastic librarian, preferably more than one, so if the fantastic librarian goes out to lunch or falls into a tar pit, there will be a spare. A fantastic librarian can help you find what you are looking for, and not just if it is a book. A fantastic librarian can help you find a hobby or an occupation, a cure or a challenge, a quiet fact or a loud opinion, or a small town where you might hide for months. A fantastic librarian knows more about what you are looking for than you do, the way a cookie in a bakery knows you want to eat it before you even know it is out of the oven, and like a good cookie, a fantastic librarian doesn’t show off about it, just waits silently for you to open your mouth. I was a little ashamed of myself for not thinking earlier I should go to the library to investigate my sinister note, but I comforted myself by remembering that the library was not open early in the morning, presumably so the fantastic librarians can eat a hearty breakfast to gather their strengths. I saw my favorite librarian right away, and she hates so much to show off that she doesn’t want her name in these pages, so for the purposes of this book I am identifying her as the great American poet Emily Dickinson. She is not, of course, actually Emily Dickinson, who is dead and was rumored to have been such an odd person that she likely would not have made a good librarian, but in this book, she is quite alive and very capable, and I was very happy to see her.

  “Good morning, Ms. Dickinson,” I said. “I’m happy to see you.”

  “I’m happy to see you too, Mr. Snicket,” replied the poet. “How might I be of assistance? From where I’m sitting, you look a little worried.”

  Where Emily Dickinson was sitting was an elegant wooden desk, donated to the library from a bank that closed down about a hundred years after her death. She shut a book she was reading, and looked at me expectantly, as I took out the message and pushed it across the desk for her to read.

  You had poison for breakfast.

  I watched her eyes sweep across the scrap of paper more than twice. A fantastic librarian reads everything two times at least.

  “You’ve brought me a great number of bewildering slips of paper,” she said, “but this might be the most bewildering yet.”

  “I would prefer not to die,” I told her, “so I’ve spent all morning thinking about it.”

  “Well, that seems like a big part of your occupation, Mr. Snicket. Isn’t it? You walk the streets, usually with a book and some scraps of paper in your pocket, thinking about things and writing them down, and sooner or later you end up in a library.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “Today I left my house to follow a stranger, but he vanished. I visited a tea shop, but it was closed. I talked to my beekeeper, and she pointed me toward the water. I jumped in the water and thought of the supermarket. I escaped the supermarket and went to the park. I fell in the park and had a conversation. The conversation was imaginary so I asked a question. But the question had no answer, and all the while I kept thinking and writing notes to myself, and I’m not sure one scrap of it has been of any use whatsoever.”

  “That is one of the frustrations of a life spent in literature,” the librarian said ruefully, gesturing to the books which were surrounding us. “Countless writers express countless ideas on so many bits of paper, and at some unknown moment some specific book, even some specific sentence, will be the right one for the right person. We never know when some scrap of literature will have its finest hour.”

  “So what do we do?” I asked, as countless readers have asked one another.

  “We keep reading,” the librarian said firmly, “and it just might be our turn to triumph.” She handed me my scrap of paper and opened the book she was reading. “I’ve spent all morning with the story of a composer who triumphed over much more troubling circumstances than yours, Mr. Snicket.”

  “The composer who never moved the notes around, even a little bit?”

  “No, not that one,” said Emily Dickinson. “This composer’s music is very moving indeed, and I’ve just learned the story of how my favorite of his pieces was written. The composer had been captured by an army and was forced to live in a prison camp. In that terrible place he met three other musicians, and using a broken pencil and some old paper given to him by a prison guard, wrote a piece of music for the four of them to play together. Somehow they found instruments—a violin, a cello, a clarinet and a piano, all terribly damaged—and organized an outdoor concert. The day of the concert, it was pouring rain, but they performed this new, strange piece for an audience of hundreds of prisoners and guards who gathered to hear it.” She flipped pages in her book until she found what she was looking for. “Do you know what the composer said about that day, Mr. Snicket?”

  “I cannot imagine,” I said.

  “I couldn’t either,” the librarian said. “I can’t really imagine what a prison camp is like. I’ve read books and I’ve seen pictures, so I know that prison camps usually consist of a group of buildings or tents that are heavily guarded and very uncomfortable. Prisoners sleep all crowded together, and all day long are forced to do exhausting labor, and there is hardly enough food to go around. But I can’t imagine it, really. I cannot truly picture a place where a simple writing implement cannot be found, or where hundreds of people would stand in the rain to hear four musicians play on battered instruments.”

  “I can’t either,” I said. “Tell me what he said.”

  Emily Dickinson nodded, and read out loud from the composer’s story. “Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension,” she said. “That means everyone was listening very closely, and everybody understood his music like they never had before.” She shut the book and gazed down at it in admiration. “It was his finest hour. Can you imagine?”

  “No,” I said. “I guess I’d better keep reading.”

  The librarian gave me a little salute, and gestured toward one of my favorite tables for reading, or just sitting and thinking. It was true that I couldn’t imagine the story she had told me, not really. I could see a pencil with its wood cracked and scratched, the sort you might normally throw away. I could picture an old piano, getting rained on. But I could not imagine the music or the desperation or the menacing ugliness of life in a prison camp. It was a lonely feeling, to think about something I could not imagine. As a writer, my imagination was my most important tool, even more important than a pencil or a scrap of paper. Even before I could write, I could imagine things, but right now my imagination seemed useless, in the face of such truly enormous suffering.

  My friend the shoemaker lived for awhile in such a place, a prison camp full of starvation and death. She did not choose to live there, of course. She was imprisoned there with her sister, who did not survive. Every morning they would walk together around the grounds of the prison camp, the shoemaker told me, under the watchful eyes of the guards, and here it is necessary to tell you why I call this friend a shoemaker. It was not, for most of her life, what she did for a living. But she was good with her hands and could fashion all kinds of ingenious fixes at the camp, with the meager materials which were around. The guards had noticed this, and asked her to fix their shoes, which had been torn and tattered during the rough winters. Of course, when guards ask something of prisoners, they are not really asking. They are forcing, and the shoemaker was forced to become a shoemaker. For the rest of her life, she sometimes referred to herself as a shoemaker, always with a smile that was sad about her past and grateful it was over.

  I cannot imagine it myself, not really, and in a way it seems that the shoemaker and her sister could not really imagine it either, so they imagined something else instead. It is one of the mysteries of the world that you can change the landscape with your mind, that everything around you can move and shift just from the way you are imagining it. The shoemaker told me that as she and her sister walked the grounds of the prison camp, they would pretend it was a fancy country club instead, a place where wealthy people might stroll around talking and eating elegant food. The shoemaker and her sister walked around the prison camp, and talked to each other like people without a care in the world, exchanging tiny complaints about their imaginary country club. “I didn’t like the lemon slice they put in my water,” the shoemaker would say, in a place where clean water was often impossible to find. “The lettuce in my sandwich was wilted,” said her sister, who would soon die of starvation. It is a true story, about where they were and what they imagined, and no matter how often I sit and think about it, I cannot really imagine it.

  I sat in the library thinking of it once more, not only the story of the shoemaker, but the story of the composer, both sad and both desperate and in similar, terrible places. Such stories keep happening, again and again and again, and it is one of the world’s most upsetting mysteries that this seems never to change. “Few people can be happy,” says a famous philosopher, “unless they hate some other person, nation or creed.” “Creed” refers to what people believe, and I believe that everyone in the world should feel as welcome and safe as I did in that library. But of course that is not how the story goes. People are unwelcome and unsafe all over the world, and it is other people who make them feel that way. We all do. We are miserable at home, or at school, scared when we walk the streets, and we are terrorized in all sorts of places, ghastly and desperate, all over the globe. Not all suffering is the same, and we are not all suffering at the same time, but every person or nation or creed has had their turn, or is waiting their turn to suffer or to force suffering on us, sometimes so terribly that for some of us, at some moment somewhere in the world, the only escape is into the world of the imagination, because we cannot really imagine what is happening and what we have done. We have poisoned ourselves, I thought, looking at the scrap of paper in my hand, and felt so overwhelmed, so bewildered there in the library, that I looked around the room for the librarian again, so I could ask her once more what to do.

  Except I knew her answer, of course: keep reading, and I took the small book out of my pocket, the one I had been reading at breakfast. It was an old book of poetry, much older than the work of Emily Dickinson who was busying herself with something at her desk. I thought it might be of some comfort, in my bewilderment, to read a few lines from this book, which I had read several times before. I had marked my favorite poems in the table of contents, and made a few notes, here and there, in the margins.

  But when I opened the book I found no comfort, and certainly no cure for my bewildered state. If anything I was more bewildered. For I saw, in the margins, the notes I had made. My handwriting has often been described, by various adults who believed it was their job to improve me, as “unclear,” and it is true it drifts here and there, into its own shapes and loops, as if the letters are wandering around town, instead of marching in a straight line. But my handwriting is always clear to me, and it was clear to me at that moment. I knew that it was my own handwriting, not only in the margins of the book, but on the scrap of paper that had bewildered me all day.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  You had poison for breakfast.

  This is how I write. I think of the finished book, such as the one you are now holding in your hands, as a little animal, doing its specific animal tasks: making little noises, pecking at something on the ground, and interacting with other animals in the barnyard of literature. It is a chicken, in other words, and the egg it sprang from is the finished manuscript, a phrase which here means “neatly typed up pages with all of the sentences looked over carefully for grammatical mistakes or spelling errers.” That egg, my final manuscript, comes from an earlier draft of the book, which is typed up and then covered in scratched-out phrases and added paragraphs and big curvy arrows moving parts of the book from one place to the other, my pen clucking and squawking all over this chicken of a draft. There are several more drafts before this one, like another egg and another chicken and so on and so forth, as I decide what to put into the story, and what to leave out, which is why this finished book contains the book about David and the film about Eve but not the book about Leander and the film about Lady Sylvia, even though I like those too.

  Before these previous drafts of this book are various ideas for what the book might be. I write down these ideas in a notebook I keep with me, but not always. I have instructed myself, over and over, to keep my notebook handy at all times, but if you told me to describe myself in one word, it would be “not very good at following directions.” Sometimes my notebook is in my other coat, or in the pocket of a different pair of pants from the one I am wearing. Sometimes I have left it in another room, or in a different office, or even once in the back of a taxicab I had managed to track down on a rainy day. Sometimes it is on the shore, and I am miles away in the open water, but sometimes it is nearby and I am simply too lazy to stand up or reach down or stretch over or look under to find it, but often the idea is so exciting that I cannot wait, and when that happens I write down my idea on anything I can find, on index cards or graph paper, old shopping lists or bookmarks, and of course on scraps of paper, small and white like eggshells, that flutter in the breeze like the feathers of chickens. They trail behind me wherever I go, and I find them everywhere, on desks and in drawers and left on bookshelves and fallen on the floor, where I had found one this morning that told me I had poison for breakfast.

  It might seem unbelievable to you that I did not recognize my own scrap of paper, or my own handwriting, or the idea I’d had myself. But I believed it. There are so many objects that I find that I have forgotten about until they are in my hands again, and they remind me of times in my life I had otherwise forgotten, the way you will visit a place you think is new and then something, a sound or smell or some tiny detail, will make you realize it is familiar after all. It is even like that with books. I have not forgotten any of my books, but sometimes when I open one up—Shouldn’t You Be In School? for example, or 29 Myths on the Swinster Pharmacy— I cannot believe that it is my own work, that it came from a finished manuscript which came from a draft which came from another draft which came from an idea on a scrap of paper which came from my hand, and now here it is, a finished book, coming home to roost in the mind of whoever might read it.

  I looked around the room, which was empty except for the scrap of paper I was holding, and the book I was reading, and the table and chair I was using, and the other chairs and tables and the other patron in the library and shelf after shelf of literature and Emily Dickinson, smiling at me, and I told myself that this was a silly way to describe a room, to say it was empty except for many, many things. In the next draft the sentence should be better, I thought, and shorter too. Almost always, shortening a sentence improves it. A nice short sentence feels like something has been left out, which helps give it the element of surprise.

  You had poison for breakfast.

  I had spent all day investigating this sentence, because, as I explained to the librarian, I preferred not to die. But that was a ridiculous thing to say. I knew I would die. I had just been thinking about it that morning, that we are all going to die. The end of your life is like the open manhole you’ll fall into one day while walking around, that one terrible step which will leave you in thin air and then darkness and then nothing. “Bye bye doggie,” the figure of Death will say, and you’ll vanish from the world, as grocers and goatherds and shoemakers have done before you, and as time passes the duration of your life keeps getting shorter. Each meal you eat is poison, because the food is just moving you through the world and the end of your time in it. Dinner is poison, and lunch. Brunch and eleveneses and both afternoon and bedtime snacks are poison, and so is breakfast the next morning, all these meals bringing us closer and closer to death. This had occurred to me and I had written it down, and I am writing it down now.

  It was a bewildering thought, but the history of literature is the history of bewilderment. Writers all over the world and all across history have been bewildered by the world and all the things in it they cannot imagine, which is why they are—we are—writing them down, to try and imagine them.

  The poem I had been reading, for instance, when I spotted my own handwriting in the margins, goes like this:

  Neither war, nor cyclones, nor earthquakes

  Are as terrifying as this oaf,

  who stares, sips water, and remembers

  Everything we say.

  That is the whole poem, written a long time ago in one language and translated more recently into another one. I do not understand it at all. “Oaf” is a word for someone clumsy and ridiculous, but I do not understand how or why a clumsy and ridiculous person could remember everything we say. I do not understand why this oaf is sipping water, or why that is worse than war or cyclones or earthquakes, which are disasters involving people, wind and the earth moving around. I like this poem but I do not understand it, and I suspected that the author and translator, when they wrote and translated it in different continents and thousands of years apart, were just as bewildered as I was when I read it. This is what gave me the idea, the philosophy of this book.