Oh, wait a minute. Someone did.
Phil and I started watching Cleopatra (1963) last night. We decided to break it up into four one-hour segments because it's absurdly long, and due to an obnoxious compulsion to dissect every movie I watch, I couldn't fully enjoy it without a better understanding of Alexander the Great. So I started my morning off with too much coffee and a short documentary about Alexandria, Egypt...
A kindly British lady (whose name I didn't catch) informed me of Alexander's thirst for knowledge and how it set the stage for Alexandria to become the epicenter of intellectualism in the ancient world. The city's Great Library, established circa 300 BC, managed to amass a collection of 500,000 books in a time period when all of six or seven people knew how to write [citation needed]. But in spite of the massive effort by the Ptolemaic dynasty to gather all the world's knowledge within the walls of the Royal Library, it was eventually destroyed and everything was lost.
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| The only book present in both my "library" and the Ancient Library of Alexandria. |
...which brings me to the point I've been dying to make for several paragraphs now. Even though the ancient library was destroyed, Alexandria maintains a library today that contains roughly 500,000 books. What's better still is that they house a supercomputer, and it's only purpose is to record the entirety of the worldwide web every couple of days. You know who that includes, don't you?
YOURS TRULY.
My inner narcissist did a cartwheel when she heard the news. If the modern Library of Alexandria sees fit to record my thoughts, then they must count for something, right? It's surely the end result Alexander desired! Now, here's hoping an alien race one day discovers my memoirs and bases their entire perception of humankind on my blog alone. Feel free to record your legacy in the comments section.
