Ian Dallas, in the novel The Book of Strangers, explores three events which focus on the development and enlightenment of the main librarian at State University Library. The three events are the librarian's evolution from a focus on words and the mind to a realm where words and rationality are transcended; his mysterious "decision" to give up the "white hash" which he had previously believed to be the means to enlightenment; and his discovery of a God and spirituality rooted not in duty but in delight. Together, these three events are crucial in the narrator's spiritual awakening, and lead him to discover that what he has been seeking all along is the knowledge and experience of his own self.
The future world in which the protagonist lives at the beginning of the novel is rooted in technology, rationality, social and mental control, and is without spirituality or independent thinking. His own work focuses on "sound impulses in cortical communication" (12).
However, before long he is troubled by an unnamed force working on him, an irrational feeling. He is drawn by a picture left by the previous head librarian, whose disappearance was a complete mystery. He reads a paradoxical inscription on the back of the picture: "This knowledge cannot be attained by seeking it, but only those who seek it find it. Bayazid of Bistam" (14). A "yearning" emerges in his head where only blind conformity had previously existed.
The narrator does not know what it is he desires at first, but his life is never the same after that moment. Without knowing how it has happened, he has already begun the journey beyond words and rationality, beyond technology and the material world, to an irrational, even anti-rational realm of mystery and spirituality.
This "journey," the narrator says, "had begun as I sat immobile in that empty room" (14-15). Indeed, the journey has begun and the narrator is drawn inexorably to the discoveries awaiting him as ...