Question

For years, Aurelio had meticulously mapped the library of his ancestors, convinced that the arrangement of the volumes held a secret geometry of the soul. Each shelf was a decade, each leather-bound cover a monument to a forgotten relative whose voice had been reduced to margins of ink. He believed that by deciphering the sequence, he could reconstruct the exact moment his family's fortune had dissolved into the dust of the valley. Yet, on the eve of his completion, as he placed the final ledger from the year of the great drought, he realized the catalog was not a chronicle of what had been, but a mirror of his own decay. The dust on the pages was not the residue of history, but the slow, quiet accumulation of his own ignored hours. The library did not house the memory of the dead; it was a monument to his own self-imposed exile from the living world, a gilded cage built of words where time did not flow, but merely evaporated.

Which of the following best describes the central theme of the passage?