There are only one or two things you don’t yet know, Müller, and
the time has come to fill you in. You imagine, as does everybody else for
that matter, that our organization has for many years been preparing the
greatest document centre ever conceived, an archive that will bring together
and catalogue everything that is known about every person, animal and
thing, by way of a general inventory not only of the present but of the past
too, of everything that has ever been since time began, in short a general
and simultaneous history of everything, or rather a catalogue of everything
moment by moment. And that is indeed what we are working on and we
can feel satisfied that the project is well advanced: not only have we already
put the contents of the most important libraries of the world, and likewise
the archives and museums and newspaper annals of every nation, on our
punch cards, but also a great deal of documentation gathered ad hoc, person
by person, place by place.

this material is being put through a reduction process that brings it down to
the essential, condensed, miniaturized minimum, a process whose limits
have yet to be established; just as all existing and possible images are being
filed in minute spools of microfilm, while microscopic bobbins of
magnetic tape hold all sounds that have ever been and ever can be recorded.
What we are planning to build is a centralized archive of human kind, and
we are attempting to store it in the smallest possible space, along the lines
of the individual memories in our brains.

What you are not aware of is the true purpose of our work. It has to
do with the end of the world, Müller. We are working in expectation of an
imminent disappearance of life on Earth. We are working so that all may
not have been in vain, so that we can transmit all we know to others, even
though we don’t know who they are or what they know.

May I offer you a cigar? Forecasts that the Earth will not be able to
support life, or at least human life, for much longer should not distress us
unduly. We have all been aware for some time that the sun is halfway
through its lifespan: however well things went, in four or five billion years
everything would be over. That is, in a short while the problem would have
presented itself anyway; what is new is that the deadline is now very much
nearer, we have no time to lose, that’s all.

Obviously the extinction of our species is not a happy prospect, but crying about it offers only
the same empty consolation as when we mourn the death of an individual.
(I’m still thinking of my dear Angela, do forgive my emotion.) There are
doubtless millions of planets supporting life forms similar to our own; it
hardly matters whether our image lives on in them or whether it be their
descendants rather than our own who carry on where we left off. What
does matter is that we give them our memory, the general memory put
together by the organization of which you, Müller, are about to be made
director.

Italo Calvino - World Memory (zo zbierky Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories)