You there! Yes, you. Follow me, if you will, and I will show you a place most wondrous and peculiar – a place unlike any in this world, or any other for that matter.

It takes a ways to get there, along a path so well trod that banks of dirt and stone hundreds of feet high abut you on either side, but tarry on, I promise it's worth it.

At the trail's end you see a tower – a single round column, made of alabaster stone, piercing the clouds as it spirals ever upwards. The double doors, thrice a man's height and nearly as wide, are inlaid with gemstones both known and not. As you approach, you see that they weave and wind through gilded troughs in fractal patterns that grow smaller and smaller until you can no longer see where they end. If they end.

You look for a keyhole, but there is none – and when you push them inwards, the doors swing open easily. As you step inside, sparkling tiles of granite twinkle up at you, reflecting light from unseen sources. Your eyes are drawn to the shelves of mahogany lining the circular walls, each packed to the brim with books. The spines are of every color, from the blackest black to the whitest white, some with widths of scarcely a sliver and others so thick you wonder how they were bound in the first place. No two appear to be alike.

It is a library. Who built such a thing? Perhaps one of these books will tell you. You test out one of many evenly spaced ladders along the walls – it is sturdy, spotless new – and climb to an arbitrary shelf an arbitrary height above the ground.

Your eyes alight on one volume in particular, one that seems to glow and call out to you. As you pluck it from its place and scan its parchment pages, you see that it is about the library itself. It details its history – a manmade structure, constructed by means detailed in symbols arcane and indecipherable to you. Perhaps you'll come across a way to translate it someday.

It says you need only think of a question, and the book with its answer will appear. Satisfied, you carefully slide the volume back into place, then pull out the one right next to it, idly curious. It is a psychology book about the nature of curiosity itself, its biological origins and the countless theories about it from scholars both familiar to you and not.

Upwards and onwards the shelves stretch. 'They must go on forever,' you think, and you may be right. 'These books must contain every knowable thing,' you think, and again you may be right.

It strikes you that you are alone, the library silent save for the rustling of the pages you turn. 'There must be other people here,' you think, and again you may be right. What you don't realize, however, is that the probability of meeting another person is zero in the infinite building – a fact you'd doubtless discover in one of the many mathematics texts here. Perhaps you'll come across one someday.

None of the pages in these books are marred, none of their corners bent. All are carefully footnoted and cross-referenced, facilitating further exploration beyond the scope of what is written above. Perhaps you'll be interested in following one of these endless threads.

There are no windows, nor skylight above, but of what use are those? Vivid descriptions of earth and trees and sky and sun abound on countless pages of countless tomes. What does it matter that you'll never again taste the bright, crisp taste of an apple? You can live in the infinite space between the infinite words. Why would you return to the life you used to live? Every experience of every lifetime is thoroughly recounted in the chronicles around you. Surely whatever adventures would otherwise await you pale in comparison?

Here, you lack for nothing. Here, everything is within reach.

Why would you ever leave?