I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of Library

What might have had in common Jorge Luis Borges, the genial and perhaps the best writer of the XX century, with Ellen G. White, the Seventh-Day Adventist pioneer? Perhaps not much. However there are at least two things that they did share. Borges, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1899, had English Methodist paternal ancestors, a minister included. His Methodist grandmother, who emigrated to Argentina, had a library of considerable size, mostly populated by books in English. His fathers' library also had a significant amount of books. These libraries shaped his imagination as a boy and continued as a commonplace all his life. So much so that books and libraries are gravitational and ubiquitous components of his literature. Later in life he wrote a magnificent poem called "El Poema de los Dones" (The Poem of the Gifts) describing how he still was still surrounded by books, but as blind man now. In it he confesses that: 

I, that had always imagined Paradise as a kind of Library.

Ellen White, who was 71 years old when Borges was born, was raised Methodist. She didn't have an education even close to that of Borges. However, later in life she acquired considerable scholarship and became the most prolific female religious writer of all times. She conveyed unique insights of the spiritual world. In one of her passages she writes how Heaven will be like:

Heaven is a school; its field of study, the universe; its teacher, the Infinite One...There, when the veil that darkens our vision shall be removed, and our eyes shall behold that world of beauty of which we now catch glimpses through the microscope; when we look on the glories of the heavens, now scanned afar through the telescope; ... what a field will be open to our study!...There the student of science may read the records of creation ...In all created things he may trace one handwriting--in the vast universe behold "God's name writ large"...There will be open to the student, history of infinite scope and of wealth inexpressible... All the treasures of the universe will be open to the study of God's children. Education, 302-307.

There are thus at least two points of contact between Borges and White; the Methodist tradition on the one hand, and the passion for books on the other. One imagined (and hoped?) Heaven as a library, the other said that it was actually so.

I like to think that White's account of Heaven might have comforted Borges very much, had he read it. I also like to think that White would have been very pleased with the verse of Borges, had she read it. 

At least we might be comforted and pleased with such account and such poetic description of Heaven.