Library at Night

Michelangelo's contemporary Giorgio Vasari speaks of the "licence" that the artist allowed himself when he departed from classical notions of proportion and order, a licence to which, says Vasari, "all artists are under a great and permanent obligation." According to Vasari, nowhere did Michelangelo better demonstrate these new ideas than in the Laurentian Library,

namely, in the beautiful distribution of the windows, the pattern of the ceiling, and the marvelous entrance of the vestibule. Nor was there ever seen such resolute grace, both in detail and overall effect, as in the consoles, tabernacles, and cornices, nor any stair­way more commodious. And in this stairway, he made such strange breaks in the design of the steps, and he departed in so many details and so widely from normal practice, that everyone was astonished.¹⁷⁴

The stairway that Vasari so admired is indeed a marvel. Michelangelo had conceived it in walnut, not in the grey stone in which it was finally executed by the Florentine sculptor Bartolomeo Ammanati in 1559, twenty-five years after Michelangelo's departure from Florence

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Ground plan of the Pergamon Library.

in 1534. But even in grey stone rather than dark wood, which would have introduced the visitor to the material of the desks and the ceiling of the reading room beyond, the stairway suggests a spatial complexity that seems almost impossible in so restricted a space, a laboriously intricate passage proposing at least three different routes, an obligation of choice entirely appropriate for someone entering the realm of books. The area of the vestibule is small; Michelangelo's design treats it as if it were vast, so that the stairs cascade from between the balustrades out­side the door onto three descents with no railings, the middle one made of curving steps each finished with a volute, the side ones rectangular but, as they reach the floor, gently metamorphosing into lozenges. Writing to Vasari from Rome before construction had begun, Michelangelo said that he indeed remembered his origi­nal design for the stairway but only "as if in a dream." That is the quality that best defines the finished work.

However, what Vasari saw as startling novelty was rather the perfecting of primitive conceptions of the shape a library should occupy. The examples are many. One of the earliest dates from 2300 B.C. Archaeological digging performed in 1980 at the site of the royal palace of Ebla, in Syria, unearthed a rectangular room contain­ing the remains of a library: more than fifteen thousand clay tablets which had apparently been kept on wooden shelves along the walls; when the shelves burnt after invaders set fire to the palace, the tablets fell in heaps to the floor.¹⁷⁵ The library of Pergamum was discovered to have followed the same pattern twenty-five centuries later. Its ruins show that it consisted of a rectangle formed by a succession of chambers: the first and largest one used for meetings, the following three housing the stacks. Readers consulted the scrolls in the space before the chambers, sheltered by a colonnade. In Rome, in the library of the Forum of Trajan, built in a.d. 112, the design changed somewhat: the rectangular shape was maintained, but the division into small rooms was elimi- nated.¹⁷⁶ Designing the Laurentian Library, Michelangelo was aware that he was evolving a practi­cal, ancient design familiar to Plato and to Virgil.

Throughout his life, Michelangelo seems to have pur­sued two conflicting yet complementary ideals of the ancient world. One was the ideal of perfection, the fin­ished quality of Greek art that he and his contemporaries believed gave each of its masterpieces the durable impression of a thing complete unto itself. The other was its fragmentary nature, the result of time and chance that, in the eyes of the Renaissance artists, allowed cer­tain ruins and myriad broken remains to reflect a van­ished perfection now implicit in the surviving headless torsos and details of columns¹⁷⁷—an aesthetic discovery much exploited later by the inventors of the Gothic revival in the eighteenth century. The Laurentian Library displays both qualities.

Among the many discoveries made by the artists of the Renaissance was the "golden section." Though the con­cept had been known in ancient Greece and had been used in both Greek and Roman architecture, it was not clearly articulated until 1479, when the mathematician Luca Pacioli, in a book illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci and not printed until ten years later, defined it as "a line cut in such a way that the smaller section is to the greater as the greater is to the whole."¹⁷⁸ The pleasing perfection of such a measure cannot be explained mathematically, and therefore held (and still holds today) a magical aes­thetic quality, as a physical equilibrium for which there exists no formula. The rectangle of the reading room designed by Michelangelo, whose sides correspond to the ideal proportions dictated by this "golden section," pays homage to the balanced beauty of a Greek temple or a Roman courtyard, and reduces the lovely proportions of our vast universe to a measure pleasing to our human eyes. The stern windows and recurrent volutes, and the complex and dynamic stairway perfectly illustrate the paradoxical nature of a library. The first suggests that it can be an ordered, contained place where our knowledge of the universe can be gracefully stored; the second implies that no order, no method, no elegant design can ever fully hold it.

THE LIBRARY

AS CHANCE

A library's ideal function is to be a little bit like a bouquiniste's stall, a place for trouvailles.

Umberto Eco, "What Is the Name of the Rose?"

A library is not only a place of both order and chaos; it is also the realm of chance. Books, even after they have been given a shelf and a number, retain a mobility of their own. Left to their own devices, they assemble in unexpected formations; they follow secret rules of simi­larity, unchronicled genealogies, common interests and themes. Left in unattended corners or on piles by our bedside, in cartons or on shelves, waiting to be sorted and catalogued on some future day many times post­poned, the stories held by books cluster around what Henry James called a "general intention" that often escapes readers: "the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet."¹⁷⁹

For Umberto Eco, a library should have a haphazard, flea-market quality. Sunday morning, a brocante is set up in one of my neighbouring villages. It has none of the pretensions of the well-established flea markets of Paris, nor the prestige of the antiquarian fairs regularly sched­uled throughout France. The brocante is a hodgepodge of everything from massive nineteenth-century country furniture to bits of ancient brocade and lace, from chipped pieces of china and crystal to rusty screws and gardening tools, from regrettable oil paintings and anonymous family photos to one-eyed plastic dolls and battered miniature cars. These commercial encamp­ments have the feel of the ancient ruined cities imagined by Stevenson from a child's point of view:

There I'll come when I'm a man With a camel caravan; Light a fire in the gloom Of some dusty dining-room; See the pictures on the walls, Heroes, fights, and festivals; And in a corner find the toys Of the old Egyptian boys.¹⁸⁰

At the brocante, my own interest usually lies in the crate- fuls of postcards, prints, calendars and especially books. Sometimes the books are displayed under an obvious banner: history of the region or New Age arcana, ani­mal husbandry or love stories. But most of the time they pile up haphazardly, single volumes of leather-bound eighteenth-century translations of Homer together with shabby wartime Simenons, fine editions of signed novels (I found a 1947 copy of Colette's Cheri, mysteri­ously inscribed "To Gloriane, who attempts to 'repair' women and who miraculously succeeds," in a box of "2 x 8 euros"), together with countless long-forgotten American bestsellers.

Books come together because of the whims of a collec­tor, the avatars of a community, the passing of war and time, because of neglect, care, the imponderability of survival, the random culling of the rag-and-bone trade, and it may take centuries before their congregation acquires the identifiable shape of a library. Every library, as Dewey discovered, must have an order, and yet not every order is willed or logically structured. There are libraries that owe their creation to affectations of taste, to casual offerings and encounters. In the desert of Adrar, in central Mauritania, the oasis cities of Chinguetti and Ouadane still house dozens of age-old libraries whose very existence is due to the whims of passing caravans laden with spices, pilgrims, salt and books. From the fif­teenth to the eighteenth century, these cities were obliga­tory halting points on the route to Mecca. The books deposited here throughout the years, for reasons of trade or safety—treasures that included works from the cele­brated Koranic schools of Granada and Baghdad, Cairo and Meknes, Cordoba and Byzantium—are lodged now in the private homes of several distinguished families. In Chinguetti, for instance—an oasis that boasted twelve mosques and twenty-five thousand inhabitants during its golden age in the eighteenth century—five or six families among the remaining three thousand souls now keep, for the curious reader, over ten thousand volumes of astronomy, sociology, commentaries on the Koran, grammar, medicine and poetry.¹⁸¹ Many of these were borrowed from travelling scholars and copied by the librarians of these erudite cities; sometimes, reversing the process, students would arrive here and spend

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Reading-room in the Habott Library, Mauritania.

months copying out one of the books kept on the library shelves.

A story is told in Ouadane of a beggar who, early in the fifteenth century, appeared at the city gates, famished and dressed in tatters. He was taken into the mosque, fed and clothed, but no one succeeded in making him reveal his name or the city of his birth. All the man seemed to care for was spending long hours among the books of Ouadane, reading in complete silence. Finally, after sev­eral months of such mysterious behaviour, the imam lost his patience and said to the beggar, "It is written that he who keeps knowledge to himself shall not be made wel­come in the Kingdom of Heaven. Each reader is but one chapter in the life of a book, and unless he passes his knowledge on to others, it is as if he condemned the book to be buried alive. Do you wish such a fate for the books who have served you so well?" Hearing this, the man opened his mouth and gave a lengthy and marvellous commentary on the sacred text he happened to have before him. The imam realized that his visitor was a certain celebrated scholar who, despairing of the deaf­ness of the world, had promised to hold his tongue until he came to a place where learning was truly honoured.¹⁸²

The starting point of a library is sometimes imponder­able. In the year a.d. 336, a Buddhist monk whose name has failed to reach us ventured on a pilgrimage along the Great Silk Road, between the Gobi Desert and the wastes of Taklimakan, in that vast area of Central Asia which, two centuries earlier, had been named the land of the Seres by the Greek geographer Pausanias, after the word for silkworm.¹⁸³ Here, amid the sand and stones, the monk had a vision of his Lord in a constellation of a thousand points of light (which unbelievers have attempted to explain as the effect of the sun playing on shards of pyrite scattered over the region's mountain­side). To honour the vision, the monk hollowed out a cave in the rocks, plastered the walls and painted them with scenes from the life of Buddha.

Over the next thousand years, almost five hundred caves were carved out of the soft stone and embellished with exquisite murals and sophisticated clay statues, giv­ing rise to the celebrated Sanctuary of Mogao in Western China. These images, sculpted and painted by succeeding generations of pious artists, record the metamorphosis of the essentially abstract Tibetan and Chinese Buddhist iconography into a figurative religion that calls for the depiction of fabulous stories involving adventurous gods, ambitious kings, enlightened monks and questing heroes. In time, the sanctuary received various names, among them Mogaoku, or Caves of Unparallelled Height, and Qianfodong, or Site of a Thousand Buddhas.¹⁸⁴ Then, sometime in the eleventh century, probably to preserve them from the cupidity of foreign armies, a collection of over fifty thousand invaluable manuscripts and paintings was hidden away and sealed in one of the Mogao caves, transforming the site into the world's "largest and earliest paper archive and only Buddhist library of its time,"¹⁸⁵ which was to lie undisturbed for seven centuries.

But this honeycomb of caves at Mogao was not the only precious repository in the region. Not far from the sanctuary rose the ancient city of Dunhuang, founded in the fourth century B.C. and one of the most important central stopping places on the Great Silk Road, which ran from Luoyang on the Yellow River to the east, towards Samarkand and Baghdad to the west. A couple of centuries after its foundation, due to its strategic position on the edge of the Chinese Empire, Dunhuang became a garrison town coveted by many nations: the Tibetans, the Turkic Uigurs, the Khotanese, the Tanguts and eventually the Mongols, who conquered this eminently cosmopolitan area in the early thirteenth century, under the rule of Genghis Khan. An extraordi­nary mixture of cultures came together at this border between the two great deserts, gathering under one roof (or the several roofs of Dunhuang) the luxurious fash­ions of Persia and the formal styles of Hellenistic Asia, the multitudinous cultures of India and the conventions of Chinese crafts, the abstractions of Tibetan civilization and the representations of European figurative arts.

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The Dunhuang Caves on the Great Eastern Silk Road.

A vertical fifth-century frieze from Dunhuang, deco­rated with dancing figures, seems to mimic the move­ments of a similar frieze discovered in Pompeii; a third-century haut relief in stone, illustrating the story of how Prince Siddhartha learned sixty-four different alphabets from his teacher, Visvamitra, shows the young boy sitting cross-legged with his writing implements in the same position and crowned with the same halo as the Christ Child carved in ivory on a German prayer-book cover from the tenth century, exhibited at the Musee de l'Oeuvre Notre Dame in Strasbourg; a sixth-century ceiling decoration from Dunhuang, representing three hares chasing each other in a circle, echoes that on the thirteenth-century floor tiles of Chester Cathedral in England; tapestries found many miles to the east of Khotan, an oasis visited by Marco Polo in 1274, show images of Roman gladiators; murals from a Buddhist temple in an eighth-century Tibetan fort near the desert of Lop Nor in China depict winged angels reminiscent of those in hundreds of medieval European altars.¹⁸⁶

In an empire as vast as China, such cultural intermin­gling had long been known to be a consequence, good or bad, of expansionist policies, and it was clear to the Chinese that one of the conqueror's prerogatives was not to silence, but to take on and become enriched by, the achievements of the cultures it vanquished. An ancient Chinese chronicle tells how, after conquering the king­dom of Ch'in in 206 B.C., the Chinese leaders Hsiang Yu of Ch'u and Liu Pang of Han fought each other for supremacy. One night, when Hsiang Yu and his troops were besieged by Liu Pang, they heard the songs of their native Ch'u being sung in the enemy camp, "and they finally realized that the land of Ch'u was now completely in the hands of Liu Pang of Han."¹⁸⁷

All these different peoples whose tastes and traditions influenced and transformed one another, whether they were passing through or settling for a time in those faraway regions, recorded their transactions and experi­ences—momentary or transcendent, practical or imagi- native—in the regular course of their lives. Dunhuang thereby became, as well as a trading place for precious manuscripts, a dumping ground for every conceivable kind of doodle and scribble penned by the monks, pilgrims, soldiers and merchants who visited it over two thousand years: administrative papers and private docu­ments, personal and public correspondence, holy writ­ings and secular accountings, casual scrapbooks and ceremonial scrolls. Even after this section of the Silk Road became less frequented and Dunhuang fell out of favour the mass of detritus continued to accumulate, the remains of the daily lives of the people who lived here. For hundreds of years, both the hoard of manuscripts in

Mogao and the scraps and rag-ends left behind in the abandoned dwellings of Dunhuang lay forgotten under the desert sand.

In 1900 a British scholar with the improbable name of Marcus Aurelius (later reduced to Mark Aurel) Stein, born in Hungary and employed in the India Office, became curious about the stories that trickled through concerning a seemingly legendary region. He made his way over thousands of inhospitable kilometres of rock and sand in search of the forgotten sanctuary. In one of his published reports of the adventure, Stein named the area Serindia, echoing Pausanias's nomenclature.¹⁸⁸ Stein led four expeditions to Serindia, and in spite of little and belated assistance from the British authorities he amassed an extraordinary cache of manuscripts and objects.

To the government of China, at least, Stein's expedi­tions seemed like excuses for indiscriminate looting in order to fill the rooms of the British Museum. However, Stein collected not only costly manuscripts and works of art but also the odds and ends left behind as mere rubbish by the inhabitants of the desert cities, which he said, "though it could never tempt treasure-seekers of suc­ceeding ages, has acquired for us exceptional value:"¹⁸⁹ a broken mousetrap or a shard from a shattered drinking- cup, a list of instructions on how to preserve grain and a humble apology for having gotten drunk at a party, the first draft of a Buddhist poem and a prayer for the safe recovery of a kidnapped child.

Not all the booty was unearthed by the expeditions. Thousands of the more valuable manuscripts that Stein brought back to England had been sold to him by a Daoist monk named Wang Yuanlu, who had already

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The magnificent Diamond Sutra.

given away many important pieces to secure the favour of local magistrates. Many of Stein's acquisitions were unique: the earliest surviving examples of Chinese painted scrolls, complete with their original silk ties; the earliest cosmological map in existence (which for the Chinese was also a diagram of political administration, since the emperor was believed to be the Celestial Commander); and the celebrated Diamond Sutra, the oldest known printed book in the world. Preserved today among the holdings of the British Museum, they constitute one of the rarest, most important collections of all time.

But a collection representing what? What do they have in common—these great works on philosophy and astronomy, theology and politics, carefully preserved in a sealed cave for a future reader, and the fragments of letters, lists and jottings found in the ruins of a tavern or in a bricked-up latrine? Unlike the Mauritanian libraries in the oasis cities of Chinguetti and Ouadane, kept by guardians who accepted their assignment as an ancestral duty, neither the treasures of Serindia nor its discarded leavings came into the hands of any expert authority except a late and remote outsider. Chance brought them together, but now, rescued from their entombment, these fragments have an evident coherence. What lies before us, in the halls of the British Museum and in the stacks of the British Library, may appear as only the booty of an ambitious explorer, a foundling collection of orphan writings, the stammering chronicle of a lost civilization, a cautionary tale for our empires today. Or we can see Stein's enterprise as a rescue mission. In its own time each of these pieces possessed a value and a function without any relation to the others. Brought together, they stand before us in joint witness, as a library of sur­vivors, of actors in a long-vanished history.

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THE LIBRARY

AS WORKSHOP

I will lodge where I have a mind.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Lay Morals

There 's a notable difference, for me, between the large room in which I keep most of my books, and the smaller room in which I work. In the large room, the "library proper," I choose the volumes I need or want, I sit and read and make notes, I consult my encyclopedias. But in my study, the chosen books are those that I consider more immediate, more necessary, more intimate. Battered copies of both the Pocket Oxford Dictionary and the two-volume Shorter Oxford, the faithful and stout Robert, my Pequeno Larousse Ilustrado from school, Roget's Thesaurus in the 1962 version, before unholy hands revised and mangled it, Killy's Literatur Lexicon, Graves's Greek Myths in the Penguin edition. . . . These feel like extensions of myself, ready at arm's length, always helpful, known of old. Many times I have had to work in rooms without these familiar volumes, and felt their absence as a kind of blindness or lack of voice.

In my study I also require certain talismans that have washed onto my desk over the years, which I distractedly finger while I think of the next words to write. Renaissance scholars recommended keeping different objects in the study: musical and astronomical instru­ments to lend variety and harmony to the space, natural curiosities such as strangely shaped stones and coloured shells, and portraits of Saint Jerome, patron saint of readers. I follow their recommendation in part. Among the objects on my desk are a horse-shaped soapstone from Congonhas do Campo, a bone carved into a skull from Budapest, a pebble from the Sibyl's Cave near Cumae. If my library chronicles my life story, my study holds my identity.

The rooms in which writers (that subspecies of readers) surround themselves with the materials they need for their work acquire an animal quality, like that of a den or a nest, holding the shape of their bodies and offering a container to their thoughts. Here the writer can make his own bed among the books, be as monogamous or polyg­amous a reader as he wishes, choose an approved classic or an ignored newcomer, leave arguments unfinished, start on any page opened by chance, spend the night reading out loud so as to hear his own voice read back to him, in Virgil's famous words, under "the friendly silence of the soundless moon." The humanist teacher Battista Guarino, son of the celebrated humanist Guarino Veronese, insisted that readers should not peruse the page silently "or mumble under their breath, for it so often happens that someone who can't hear him­self will skip over numerous verses as though he were somewhere else. Reading out loud is of no small benefit to the understanding, since of course what sounds like a voice from outside makes our ears spur the mind sharply to attention." According to Guarino, uttering the words even helps the reader's digestion, because it "increases heat and thins the blood, cleans out all the veins and opens the arteries, and allows no unnecessary moisture to stand motionless in those vessels which take in and digest food."¹⁹⁰ Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savour­ing the text, so as to make it all the more mine.

If the private space is the genus, then the study lodged inside that space is the species. During the Renaissance, ownership of a study was, for anyone who aspired to write, a sign of education and civilized taste. More than any other room in the house, a study was thought to pos­sess a secret character of its own, which might persist long after that owner's death.¹⁹¹ Composed of texts and talismans, icons and instruments of all sorts, a reader's or writer's study is something of a shrine, not to a deity but to an activity. The display of tools of the trade proclaims it a workshop; its order (or disorder) does not follow the requirements of an ordinary library, however private. The study is not a pared-down version of the larger structure—the library—which sometimes contains it. It has a different mission: it provides a practical space for self-reflection and conceit, for belief in the power of objects and reliance on the authority of a dictionary. The historian Jacob Burckhardt spoke of the Renaissance as "an awakening of individuality,"¹⁹² but surely individuality had been awakened many times before, in older readers' studies, by men and women who created spaces in which their private selves could learn, grow, reflect and be reflected, in dialogue between the singular present and the endless generations past—spaces into which they withdrew from the bustle of social life. Sitting in the study of his seaside house in Antium, in the first century B.C., Cicero wrote to his intimate friend Atticus, "I amuse myself with books, of which I have a goodly store at Antium, or I count the waves—the weather is unsuitable for fishing mackerel."¹⁹³ Later he added, "Reading and writing bring me, not solace indeed, but distraction."¹⁹⁴ Distraction from the noise of the world. A place to think.

In 1929, Virginia Woolf published her now famous lectures on "Women and Fiction" under the title A Room of One's Own, and there she defined forever our need for a private space for reading and writing: "The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with per­fect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace." And she added, "Not a wheel must grate, not a light glimmer. The curtains must be close drawn."¹⁹⁵ As if it were night.

The studios of celebrated writers are curious memori­als. Rudyard Kipling's studies in his house in Vermont, the Naulakha, and at Rottingdean, in which most of the books deal with travel or industrial crafts, bears wit­ness to his interest in the exact technical phrase and word; in Erasmus's room in Brussels, the light from the rhomboid windowpanes plays on volumes sent to him by those friends and colleagues for whom he liked to write; Friedrich Durrenmatt's closed, white, rectangular

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Rudyard Kipling in his study at his house in Vermont, the Naulakha.

library in Neuchatel has a simple bookshelf of neat modern bindings wrapping itself around the room, like one of the circular labyrinths he crafted in his novels; Victor Hugo's cloth-lined and soft-carpeted mansion on the Place des Vosges in Paris seems haunted by manu­scripts of his melodramatic stories and sketches of his ghostly landscapes; Arno Schmidt's small, ugly rooms in Bargfeld bei Celle, in Lower Saxony, are lined with ram­shackle shelves that held inglorious English titles (such as the novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose texts Schmidt re-created in better German versions), and small boxes with snippets handwritten on bits of card­board—miniature archives kept by Schmidt in thematic order, which he used to compose his masterpieces; thou­sands more studios and libraries around the world are preserved as memorials to their phantom owners, who might at any moment once again run an absent-minded hand over a familiar piece, sit in the customary chair, pick out a much-leafed book from among its fellows or open a volume to a certain page with cherished words. Deserted libraries hold the shades of the writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.

In Valladolid, readers of Don Quixote can stroll through the house occupied by Miguel de Cervantes from 1602 to 1605, the year in which the first part of the novel was published, and experience a voyeuristic thrill. The house has melodramatic associations: on the night of 27 June 1605, a certain Gaspar de Ezpeleta was walk­ing home when, just outside this house, he was assaulted by a masked man and mortally wounded. Ezpeleta man­aged to cry out, bringing to his assistance a neighbour who in turn summoned Cervantes, and the two carried the dying man to the address of a well-known lady. The mayor of Valladolid, suspecting Cervantes (or one of his relatives) of being responsible for the attack, ordered that the writer and his family be imprisoned. They were released a few days later, after proving their innocence, but historians have long debated the question of Cervantes's involvement in the murder. The house, though carefully restored, has necessarily been furnished with bits and pieces that never were in Cervantes's pos­session. Only the study, on the second floor, contains a few objects that almost certainly belonged to him: not the "ebony and ivory" desk described in the will of his daughter, Isabel de Cervantes, but another, also men­tioned in the document, "made of walnut, the largest one I possess," two paintings, one of Saint John and the other of the Virgin, a copper brazier, a chest for keeping papers and a single bookshelf holding some of the titles mentioned in his work. In this room he wrote several stories for his Exemplary Novels, and here he must have discussed with his friends the conception of his singular Quixote.¹⁹⁶

In one of the first chapters of Don Quixote, when the barber and the priest have decided to purge the knight's library of the books that seem to have brought on his madness, the housekeeper insists that the room must first be sprinkled with holy water, "for there might be here one of those many wizards who inhabit these books, and he might cast a spell on us, to punish us for wanting to expel them from the world."¹⁹⁷ Like so many people who do not read, the housekeeper fears the power of the books she refuses to open. The same superstition holds true for most readers; the books we keep closest to hand are possessed by magic. The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections, of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more.

Sometimes the shade of the writer and that of his library mingle long before his death. For many years, until he left to die in Geneva in 1986, Borges lived in Buenos Aires among books he could no longer see, since blind­ness had overtaken him in his early fifties. His small apartment was on the sixth floor of an unobtrusive building in the centre of town, around the corner from the Plaza San Martin. The door was always opened by Fani, the maid, who would lead his frequent visitors into a small entrance hall where, in the gloom, stood Borges's several walking sticks and canes, "patiently waiting," as he liked to say, "to be taken out for a stroll." Then, through a curtained doorway, one entered the living room, where the master would greet his guests with a weak, shy handshake. To the right, a table covered with a lace cloth and four straight-backed chairs furnished the dining room; to the left, under a window, stood a well- worn couch and two or three armchairs. Borges would sit on the couch and the visitor would be asked to take one of the armchairs facing him. His blind eyes would stare into a point in space as he spoke, his asthmatic voice echoing through the room full of the familiar things of his daily life: a small table on which he kept a silver mug and a mate that had belonged to his grand­father, a miniature writing desk dating from his mother's first communion, two white bookshelves set in the wall holding encyclopedias, and two low bookcases of dark wood. On the wall hung a painting by his sister, Norah Borges, depicting the Annunciation, and an engraving by Piranesi showing mysterious circular ruins. A short corridor to the far left led to the bedrooms: his mother's, full of old photographs, and his own, simple as a monk's cell, with an iron bedstead, two bookcases and a single chair. On the wall of his bedroom hung a wooden plate with the coats of arms of the various cantons of Switzerland, and a copy of Durer's engraving Knight, Death and the Devil, which Borges had celebrated in two exquisite sonnets.

Considering that Borges called the universe a book, and said that he imagined paradise "in the shape of a library,"¹⁹⁸ his visitors expected a place copiously lined with books, shelves bursting at the seams, piles of print blocking the doorways and protruding from every crevice—a jungle of ink and paper. Instead, they'd dis­cover this modest apartment where books occupied a dis­creet, orderly place. When the young Mario Vargas Llosa visited Borges sometime in the mid-fifties, he remarked on the spartan surroundings and asked why the master didn't live in a more bookish, more luxurious home. Borges took great offence at this remark. "Maybe that's how they do things in Lima," he said to the indis­creet Peruvian, "but here in Buenos Aires we don't like to show off."

These few bookcases, however, were Borges's pride. "I'll tell you a secret," he once explained. "I like to pre­tend I'm not blind, and I covet books like a man who can see. I even covet new encyclopedias, and imagine I can follow the course of rivers in their maps and find wonderful things in the various entries." He liked to tell how, as a child, he used to accompany his father to the National Library and, too timid to ask for a book, simply take one of the volumes of the Britannica from the open shelves and read whatever article opened itself to his eyes. Sometimes he would be lucky, as when he chose volume De—Dr and learned about the Druids, the Druzes and Dryden.¹⁹⁹ He never abandoned this custom of trust­ing himself to the ordered chance of encyclopedias, and he spent many hours leafing through (and having read to him) the volumes of the Garzanti, the Brockhaus, the Britannica or the Espasa-Calpe. Then, if there was a par­ticularly appealing tidbit of information, he would ask his reader to record it, with the page number, at the back of the revelatory volume.

The two low bookcases in his living room held works by Stevenson, Chesterton, Henry James and Kipling, as well as J.W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time, several scientific romances by H.G. Wells, Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, various novels by Ega de Queiroz in yellow­ing cardboard bindings, books by nineteenth-century Argentine writers. Here too were Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; Vies Imaginaires, by Marcel Schwob; detective novels by John Dickson Carr, Milward Kennedy and Richard Hull; Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, Arnold Bennett's Buried Alive; a small paperback edition of David Garnett's Lady into Fox and A Man in the Zoo, with delicate woodblock illustrations; Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes; the several tomes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall; various books on mathematics and philosophy, including titles by Sweden- borg and Schopenhauer; and his beloved Worterbuch der Philosophie, by Fritz Mauthner. Some of these books had accompanied Borges since his adolescent days; oth­ers, mostly the ones in English and German, carried labels from the Buenos Aires bookstores where they had been bought, all now vanished: Mitchell's, Rodriguez, Pygmalion.

The bookcases in the bedroom held volumes of poetry and one of the largest collections of Anglo- Saxon and Icelandic literature in Latin America. Here Borges kept the books he needed to study what he called "the harsh and laborious words/ That, with lips now turned to dust,/ I mouthed in the days of Northumbria and Mercia/ Before becoming Haslam or Borges":²⁰⁰ Skeat's Etymological Dictionary, an anno­tated version of The Battle ofMaldon, Richard Meyer's Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte. The other bookcase contained the poems of Enrique Banchs, of Heine, of San Juan de la Cruz, and many commentaries on Dante. Mysteriously absent from his bookshelves were Proust, Racine, Goethe's Faust, Milton and the Greek tragedies (all of which he had, of course, read and mentioned in his writings).

Absent too were his own books. He would proudly tell visitors who asked to see an early edition that he didn't possess a single volume that carried (he would say) "that eminently forgettable" name. The truth is that he didn't need them. Though he pretended not to remember, he could recite by heart poems learned many decades earlier, and correct and alter in his memory his own writings, usually to the stupefaction and delight of his listeners. Shortly after his death, his widow, Maria Kodama, donated the majority of his books to a founda­tion in Buenos Aires bearing his name, and from time to time certain volumes are shown in exhibitions organized in his honour. Lying open in glass cases, stripped of their surroundings, honoured but unread—less purveyors of words than funerary objects, expelled from their home after his death—books seem to suffer the fate of the spouses and servants of those ancient kings whose households followed their master to the grave.

A study lends its owner, its privileged reader, what Seneca called euthymia, a Greek word which Seneca explained means "well-being of the soul," and which he translated as "tranquillitas."^im Every study ultimately aspires to euthymia. Euthymia, memory without distrac­tion, the intimacy of a reading time—a secret period in the communal day—that is what we seek in a private reading space. According to Blake,

There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find,

Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, but the Industrious find

This Moment & it multiply, & when it once is found

It renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed.²⁰²

Though we primarily seek euthymia in these private moments, we can sometimes discover it in the communal space of a public library. In Mameluke Cairo, in the fif­teenth century, though there were indeed scholars who worked in their own private rooms, readers of lesser means were encouraged to visit the public libraries of schools and mosques. Here, books were made available to those who could not afford to buy them; here, they could copy out the desired works for their own use, whether to learn texts by heart or study them at leisure. The thirteenth-century scholar Ibn Jama'a, though recom­mending that students purchase books whenever possi­ble, thought it most important that they be "carried in the heart" and not merely kept on a shelf. Copying out texts helped one commit them to memory, thereby building (he thought) a sort of parallel library to the one of ink and paper. "The student should always have with him an inkwell, so as to be able to write down useful things he hears," Ibn Jama'a advised.²⁰³ It was understood that the written text supported the text learned by heart, since "what is only memorized flies away, what is written down remains" (an Islamic version of the Latin verba volant, scripta manent).^m According to Ibn Jama'a, the art of mem­ory was akin to that of architecture, since by practising it a reader could build to his taste a private palace furnished with collected treasures, declaring ownership of the texts he had chosen in a deep and definitive way. To sharpen the skill of memorizing books, the use of honey, tooth­picks and twenty-one raisins a day was recommended, while the consumption of coriander and eggplant was deemed deleterious. Ibn Jama'a also advised against "reading inscriptions on tombs, walking between camels haltered in a line, or flicking away lice,"²⁰⁵ all activities that affected the keenness of memory.

At the end of the fifteenth century, to exercise his mem­ory among the books he knew best, Niccolo Machiavelli preferred to read in his study at night—the time when he found it easiest to enjoy those qualities which for him most defined the relationship of a reader and his books: intimacy and leisured thought. "When evening comes," he wrote, "I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, for which I was born. There I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives for their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the course of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexations, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass into their world."²⁰⁶

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THE LIBRARY

AS MIND

... to give visible form to the psychic presence and to the movements of the soul.

Aby Warburg, Ausgewahlfe Schriften

Like Machiavelli, I often sit among my books at night. While I prefer to write in the morning, at night I enjoy reading in the thick silence, when triangles of light from the reading lamps split my library shelves in two. Above, the high rows of books vanish into darkness; below sits the privileged section of the illuminated titles. This arbitrary division, which grants certain books a glowing presence and relegates others to the shadows, is superseded by another order, which owes its existence merely to what I can remember. My library has no cata­logue; having placed the books on the shelves myself, I generally know their position by recalling the library's layout, and areas of light or darkness make little differ­ence to my exploring. The remembered order follows a pattern in my mind, the shape and division of the library, rather as a stargazer connects in narrative patterns the pinpoints of the stars; but the library in turn reflects the configuration of my mind, its distant astrologer. The deliberate yet random order of the shelves, the choice of subject matters, the intimate history of each book's sur­vival, the traces of certain times and certain places left between the pages, all point to a particular reader. A keen observer might be able to tell who I am from a tattered copy of the poems of Blas de Otero, the number of vol­umes by Robert Louis Stevenson, the large section devoted to detective stories, the minuscule section devoted to literary theory, the fact that there is much Plato and very little Aristotle on my shelves. Every library is autobiographical.

In the Cathedral of Sainte Cecile of Albi, in the south of France, a late-fifteenth-century fresco depicts a scene from the Last Judgment. Under an unfurled scroll, the recalled souls march towards their fate, each naked and solemnly carrying on the breast an open book. In this troop of resurrected readers, the Book of Life has been divided and reissued as a series of individual volumes, open,²⁰⁷ as the Apocalypse has it, so that the dead may be "judged out of those things which were written in the books."²⁰⁸ The idea persists even today: our books will bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we are and who we have been, our books hold the share of pages granted to us from the Book of Life. By the books we call ours we will be judged.

What makes a library a reflection of its owner is not merely the choice of the titles themselves, but the mesh of associations implied in the choice. Our experience builds on experience, our memory on other memories. Our books build on other books that change or enrich them, that grant them a chronology apart from that of lit­erary dictionaries. I'm now, after all this time, incapable

Image not available

The Last Judgement fresco at Sainte Cecile Cathedral in Albi.

of tracing all these connections myself. I forget, or don't even know, in what way many of these books relate to one another. If I advance in one direction—Margaret Laurence 's African stories conjure up in my memory Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa, which in turn makes me think of her Seven Gothic Tales, which leads me back to Edgardo Cozarinsky (who introduced me to Dinesen's work) and his book on Borges and film, and further back to the novels of Rose Macaulay, which Cozarinsky and I discussed one afternoon long ago in Buenos Aires, both of us surprised that someone else knew about them— then I miss the other strands of this complicated web, and wonder how, like a spider, I was able to string the seem­ingly immeasurable distance, for example, from Ovid's Tristia to the poems of 'Abd al-Rahman, exiled to North

Africa from his home in Spain. It is not only a matter of fortuitous connections. Books are transformed by the sequence in which they are read. Don Quixote read after Kim and Don Quixote read after Huckleberry Finn are two different books, both coloured by the reader's experience of journeys, friendship and adventures. Each of these kaleidoscope volumes never ceases to change; each new reading lends it yet another twist, a different pattern. Perhaps every library is ultimately inconceivable, because, like the mind, it reflects upon itself, multiplying geometrically with each new reflection. And yet, from a library of solid books we expect a rigour that we forgive in the library of the mind.

Such fluid mental libraries are not (or were not) uncommon; in Islam they are exemplary. Even though the Koran was written down very early, most ancient Arab literature was for a long time entrusted to the recol­lection of its readers. For instance, after the death in 815 of the great poet Abu Nuwas, no copy of his work was found; the poet had learned by heart all his poems, and in order to set them down on paper the scribes had to resort to the memory of those who had listened to the master. Precision of recall was deemed all-important, and throughout the Islamic Middle Ages, it was considered more valuable to learn by listening to books read out loud than by private study, because the text then entered the body through the mind and not merely through the eyes. Authors published not so much by transcribing their work themselves as by dictating it to their assis­tants, and students learned by hearing those texts read out to them or by reading them to a teacher. Because of the Islamic belief that only oral transmission was truly legitimate, memory (not its physical representation in the solid world of books and manuscripts, though these were important enough to be treasured in schools and mosques) was deemed to be the great repository of a library.²⁰⁹ Up to a point, "library" and "memory" were synonymous.

And yet, however careful our reading, remembered texts often undergo curious changes; they fragment, shrivel up or grow unpredictably long. In my mental library, The Tempest is reduced to a few immortal lines, while a brief novel such as Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo occupies my entire Mexican imaginary landscape. A couple of sentences by George Orwell in the essay "Shooting an Elephant" expand in my memory to sev­eral pages of description and reflection that I think I can actually see in my mind, printed on the page; of the lengthy medieval romance The Devoured Heart, all I can remember is the title.

Neither the solid library on my shelves nor the shift­ing one of memory holds absolute power for long. Over time, the labyrinths of my two libraries mysteriously intermingle. And often, through what psychologists call the perseverance of memory (the mental phenomenon by which a certain idea is perceived as true even after it has proven false), the library of the mind ends by over­riding the library of paper and ink.

Is it possible to set up a library that imitates this whimsi­cal, associative order, one that might seem to an unin­formed observer a random distribution of books, but that in fact follows a logical if deeply personal organization? I can think of at least one example.

One day in 1920, the philosopher Ernst Cas- sirer, recently appointed to the chair of philoso­phy at Hamburg's New University and working at the time on the first volume of his ground­breaking Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, asked to visit the famous Warburg Library, established thirty years earlier by Aby Warburg. Following Warburg's conception of the universe, books on philosophy were set next to those on astrology, mag­ic and folklore, and art compendiums rubbed covers with works of literature and religion, while manuals on language were placed next to volumes of theology, poetry and art. Cassirer was taken through the uniquely organized collection by the assistant director, Fritz Saxl, and at the end of the tour he turned to his host and said, "I'll never come back here. If I returned to this labyrinth, I'd end up by losing my way."²¹⁰

Aby Warburg reading.

Years later, Cassirer explained his panic: "[Warburg's] library isn't simply a collection of books but a catalogue of problems. And it isn't the thematic fields of the library that provoked in me this overwhelming impression, but rather the library's very organizing principle, a principle far more important than the mere extension of the sub­jects covered. Here, indeed, the history of art, the his­tory of religion and myth, the history of linguistics and

culture were not only placed side by side but linked one to the other, and all of them linked in turn to a single ideal centre."²¹¹ After Warburg's death in 1929, Cassirer compared the shelves of the library's reading room, built to follow the elliptical shape of the walls, to "the breath of a magician." For Cassirer, Warburg's books, arranged according to the intricacies of his thought, were, like the books of Prospero, the stronghold of his life's force.

Aby Warburg was born in Hamburg on 13 June 1866, the eldest son of a Jewish banker. Photographs show him as a short, shy-looking man with powerful dark eyes. In a questionnaire he once imagined for his own amusement, he described himself as "a small gentleman with a black moustache who sometimes tells stories in dialect."²¹² Unable to reconcile himself to his father's demands to embrace both Jewish orthodoxy and the family banking business, he suffered from long bouts of anxiety and melancholia. To find relief, he sought experience of the world in books, and became deeply interested in the early philosophies of Greek and Rome, in the cultures of the Renaissance, in Native American civilizations and in Buddhist religion. He seemed unable to accept the con­straints of any one discipline or school of thought. An eclectic curiosity dominated all his undertakings.

His passion for books and images began in his child­hood. Among the earliest intellectual experiences he could remember was seeing, at the age of six, the striking illustrations of Balzac's Petites miseres de la vie conjugale, depicting melodramatic family scenes in which weeping women, angry men, screaming children and amused ser­vants acted out the misfortunes of bourgeois married life. The boy became obsessed by them, and they vividly haunted his dreams. A couple of years later, he started devouring books "full of stories about Red Indians." These images and adventures offered him, he was later to recall, "a means of withdrawing from a depressing reality in which I was quite helpless." Unable to voice his anger and frustration, what Warburg called the emotion of pain, he sought and found "an outlet in fantasies of romantic cruelty. This was my inoculation against active cruelty."²¹³ His siblings remembered him always sur­rounded by books, reading every scrap of paper he came across—even the family encyclopedia, which he perused from the first to the last volume.

Not only reading but collecting books became for Warburg a vital need. On his thirteenth birthday, deter­mined to follow neither his father's career nor his family's religion, the voracious adolescent made his younger brother Max the offer of his birthright: he would exchange his privilege, as the eldest son, of enter­ing the family firm, for the promise that Max would buy him all the books he ever wanted. Max, aged twelve, agreed. From then on, the many books purchased with funds supplied by the faithful Max became the core of Warburg's library.

Warburg's collecting passion was never entirely hap­hazard. On the contrary; from very early on, his reading seems to have been directed towards certain very specific questions. Most of us, looking back, find it astonishing to recognize in our first books inklings of an interest that did not become apparent until much later, which never­theless apparently stirred us long before we could put our interest into words. The emotions of Warburg's childhood books finally found an explanation in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Laokoon, a classic text that he read for the first time when he entered Bonn University at the age of twenty.²¹⁴ Lessing's Laokoon became for him a magical touchstone. "One must be young," the aged Goethe had written almost sixty years earlier, "to understand the influence that Lessing's Laokoon had on us, tearing us away from the passivity of contemplation and opening up free realms of thought. The utpictura poesis [the classical comparison between the aesthetics of painting and those of poetry], so long misunderstood, was all of a sudden brushed away; their summits seemed very different to us, and yet they seemed very close in their foundations."²¹⁵ In Lessing's work the young Warburg recognized not only the power of an argument that attempted to explore the different creative systems of images and words, but above all the notion that each age recaptures for its own reasons an aspect of tradition upon which it builds its own sym- bology and meaning, what he was to call "the survival of antiquity, a problem of a purely historical nature."²¹⁶ The question that began to take shape for Warburg was how our oldest symbols are renewed at different ages, and how their reincarnations link and reverberate in each other. One of the most resonant words in his intellectual development was Kompatibilitat, compatibility²¹⁷— experience by association—so it's not surprising that he chose to explain his own library with a definition bor­rowed from the critic Ewald Hering. For Warburg his

library was memory, but "memory as organized matter."^-

218

The library that Warburg began to assemble in his adolescence, which in 1909 he transferred to his new house on the Heilwigstrasse in Hamburg, was above all a personal one, and it followed a uniquely idiosyncratic cat­aloguing system. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a controversy raged in Germany about the best method of organizing a library. The oppos­ing parties argued, on the one hand, for a hierarchical order of subjects to guide the reader from one field of knowledge to another, and on the other, for an order based on the size of a volume and its date of acquisition. (The latter, incidentally, was a system that had been employed successfully in certain medieval libraries.)²¹⁹ For Warburg, neither method was satisfactory. He demanded from his collection a fluidity and vivacity that neither enclosure by subject nor restrictions of chronology allowed him. Fritz Saxl noted in 1943 how Warburg had reacted to the idea of such mechanical cataloguing, which, in an age of increased book production, was rapidly replacing the "much more scholarly familiarity which is gained by browsing." According to Saxl, "Warburg rec­ognized the danger" and spoke of the "law of the good neighbour." The book with which one was familiar was not, in most cases, the book one needed. It was the unknown neighbour on the shelf that contained the vital information, even though one might not guess this from its title. "The overriding idea was that all the books together—each containing its larger or smaller bit of information and being supplemented by its neighbours— should by their titles guide the student to perceive the essential forces of the human mind and its history. Books were for Warburg more than instruments of research. Assembled and grouped, they expressed the thought of mankind in its constant and in its changing aspects."²²⁰

Not only books. Warburg had a remarkable memory for images, and was able to weave complicated tapestries of iconographical connections which he then attempted to expand upon in fragmentary essays. While poring through antiquarian catalogues, he would jot down on small cards the titles that caught his attention, accompa­nied by dense commentaries in what he called his "thick eel-gruel style,"²²¹ filing them in separate boxes accord­ing to a complicated (and variable) system. Those who knew him spoke of the "instinct" that guided him in compiling important bibliographies on whatever subject interested him at the time, an instinct that led him to rearrange (and keep rearranging) the books on the shelves following the lines of thought he was at any given moment pursuing. As Warburg imagined it, a library was above all an accumulation of associations, each association breeding a new image or text to be asso­ciated, until the associations returned the reader to the first page. For Warburg, every library was circular.

Warburg dedicated his library, with its oval reading room (which he called die kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, the Warburg Library of Cultural Science), to the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses. For Warburg the history of humankind was an ongoing, constantly changing attempt to give tongue and features to archaic experiences, less individual than generic, embedded in social memory. Like many schol­ars of his generation, he had been influenced by the the­ories of the German neurologist Richard Semon, who had argued for a physiological theory of emotions.²²² According to Semon, memory is the quality that distin­guishes living from dead matter. Any event affecting living matter leaves a trace (what Semon calls an engram) that can be animated when we remember. For Warburg these engrams were in fact pure symbols alive at the core of every culture, and what interested him was why a given period (the Renaissance, for example, or the Enlightenment) would be so affected by certain of these symbols, or by certain aspects of them, that they would shape the voice and style of its literature and art. Because of its haunting power, Warburg won­derfully described this active memory as "a ghost story for adults."²²³

And the library itself? What was it like to stand in the midst of what Cassirer had compared to Prospero's stronghold? Most libraries give an impression of system­atic order, of an organization made manifest by themes or numbers or alphabetical sequences. Warburg's library shows no such system. When I visited the reconstructed reading room in Hamburg (which today holds only a small part of his volumes) and inspected the rounded shelves in the oval central chamber, the feeling I had was bewilderment; it was like standing in the middle of a for­eign city whose signposts doubtlessly meant something but whose sense I couldn't fathom. The shelves suggested to the eye an uninterrupted association of titles, not a lin­ear order with a beginning and an end. Intellectually it was possible for me to find reasons for the proximity of any two titles, but those reasons could be so varied or could seem so far-fetched that I could not relate them to any traditional sequence—such as M following L, or 2999 preceding 3000. Warburg's system was closer to that of poetic composition. Reading the verse "Bright is the ring of words" on a page offers an immediate and com­plete comprehension of the poet's vision. The reader requires no explanation; the line conveys a full and instantaneous revelation about the act of reading, through the words and the elicited music. But if the poet were explicitly to lay before us all the connecting byways and meanderings springing from his ineffable intuition as to the nature of poetry—if he tried to make all the leads and connections visible to us—such comprehension would elude us. So it is with Warburg's library.

But Warburg would not allow these connections to remain invisible, nor would he consider them except as constantly changing, so he constructed his library as a space uninterrupted by sharp angles, in which they could retain endless mobility. In a sense, his library was an attempt to disclose, in all their rawness, the bare nerves of his thought, and to allow room for his ideas to migrate and mutate and mate. If most libraries of his time resem­bled an entomologist's display case of pinned and labelled specimens, Warburg's revealed itself to the visi­tor as a child's glass-fronted ant farm.

In the spring of 1914, bending to his colleagues' pressure, Warburg decided to open his library to scholars and scholarly research, instituting as well a system of grants that would enable students to come to Hamburg and work. Fourteen years earlier he had warily mentioned the idea to his brother Max; now he returned to the vast proj­ect, and discussed its possibilities with Fritz Saxl. He did so with great reluctance because, he admitted, he loathed losing possession of the private intellectual realm he had so laboriously created. And yet he realized that this open­ing up of the library was the necessary next step in his attempt to chart the intricate symbolic heritage of humankind, "the afterlife of the ancient world."²²⁴

But the First World War put a temporary end to these plans. In the midst of the bleakness and confusion of the time, Warburg, who had suffered intermittently from anxiety and depression since his childhood, began to intuit a bleak concordance between his mental state and the state of the world. "Like a seismograph, his sensitive nerves had already recorded the underground tremors to which others remained utterly deaf," wrote one of his contemporaries.²²⁵ Warburg now saw his search for con­nections between our earliest symbolic representations of irrational impulses and fears, and later artistic manifesta­tions of those symbols, as a tension reflected in his own mental struggles. He had wanted to believe that science would eventually, by chronicling the metamorphoses of our phobic reflexes, find rationally apprehensible expla­nations for our primordial emotional experiences. Instead, he realized, science had constructed as the latest avatar an even more advanced machinery of war, with its mustard gas and deadly trenches.

In one of his fragments (to which he had appended the exorcism "You live and do me no harm"²²⁶) he wrote the following: "We are in the age of Faust, in which the mod­ern scientist endeavours—between magic practice and mathematics—to conquer the realm of reflective reason through an increased awareness of the distance between the self and the external world."²²⁷ The end of the war in 1918 brought him little relief. Two years later the distance seemed, in his eyes, to have vanished almost completely.

In 1920, facing the prospect of opening his library to a scholarly public, and unable to sustain the mental anguish any more, Warburg entered the famous clinic of the Swiss doctors Otto and Ludwig Binswanger in Kreuzlingen, where Friedrich Nietzsche had been treated thirty years earlier.²²⁸ He remained there until 1924. "Why," he asked then, "does fate consign a creative human being to the realm of eternal unrest, leaving it up to him to choose where his intellectual upbringing will take place: whether in hell, purgatory or paradise?"²²⁹

His time at the clinic was one of slow recovery and attempts at reassembly, as he tried to put together his scattered mind, fragmented as it was into thousands of images and piecemeal notes. "God is in the details," he liked repeating. And yet he felt—like Rousseau, who had said, "I die in details"—that he could no longer gather the many strands of image and thought he had once pursued. But under Dr. Binswanger's care he began to feel whole again, and in 1923 he asked whether the authorities would release him if he could prove his mental stability. He suggested speaking to the clinic's patients, and on April 23 he delivered a lecture on native serpent rituals he had witnessed in North America as a young man. In a journal note he made at the time, he remarked that he saw himself as Perseus, slayer of the serpent-headed Medusa, who avoided staring directly into the poisonous monster's eyes by looking at her reflection in his shield. He also noted that, in the Middle Ages, Perseus had been debased from hero to mere fortune-teller, to be rescued only later, during the Renaissance, as a symbol of heroic humanity.²³⁰

When Warburg left the clinic in 1924, he discovered that Saxl, in agreement with Warburg's family, had finally transformed the library into the projected research centre.

The change, however much he had foreseen it, troubled him greatly and made him feel diminished; "Warburg redux," he signed one of his letters at the time. And yet the transformation also seemed to fill him with "an almost awe-inspiring energy," and he set himself to work once again, under these new conditions, amidst his beloved books.

It would be obvious to any visitor walking into Warburg's library that, from its very conception, his cre­ation was essentially a visual one. The shape of the shelves, the associated titles they housed, the pictures and photographs that littered the rooms, all spoke of his concern with the physical representation of ideas and symbols. The sources of his questions were images; books allowed him to reflect on these images, and pro­vided words to bridge the silence between them. Memory, that key word in Warburg's vocabulary, meant above all the memory of images.

Warburg's unfinished and unfinishable project was the great iconographic sequence he called Mnemosyne, a vast collection of images that charted, across a tapestry of connections, the many trails the scholar had been following. But how to display these images? How to place them in front of him so that they could be studied in sequence, but a sequence that could be varied accord­ing to new ideas and newly perceived connections? The solution to this problem came from Saxl. Upon Warburg's return to Hamburg, Saxl met him with large wooden panels, like standing blackboards, across which he had stretched black hessian. Warburg's images could be fixed with pins on the cloth, and easily removed whenever he wanted to alter their position. These giant displays, "pages" of an endless book of variable sequence, became the core of all Warburg's activities in the last years of his life. Since he could change both the panels and the images on them at will, they became the physical illustration of his realm of thought and his library, to which he appended streams of notes and comments. "These images and words are intended as help for those who come after me in their attempt to achieve clarity," he wrote, "and thus to overcome the tragic tension between instinctive magic and discursive logic. They are the confessions of an (incurable) schizoid, deposited in the archives of mental healers."²³¹ In fact, Saxl's panels—a book of giant shifting pages—restored to Warburg, up to a point, his lost private space; they were a private domain that helped him recover some of his mental health.

Aby Warburg died in 1929, at the age of sixty-three. Three years after his death, a couple of volumes of his collected works appeared in Germany; they were the last to be published in his homeland for a long time. Fragmented and wonderfully far-ranging, his writings are yet another version of his library, another represen­tation of the intricacies of his thought, another map of his extraordinary mind. He wanted his intuition to con­clude in scientific laws; he would have liked to believe that the thrill and terror of art and literature were steps towards understanding cause and function. And yet, again and again, he returned to the notion of memory as desire, and desire itself as knowledge. In one of his fragments he writes "that the work of art is something hostile moving towards the beholder."²³² With his library

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One ofWarburg's "Mnemosyne"panels.

he attempted to create a space in which that hostility would not be tamed (something he realized could not be done without destruction) but lovingly reflected back, with curiosity, respect and awe, a mirror of his curious, intelligent mind.

In 1933, following the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor of the Reich, the Warburg library and staff emigrated to England. Six hundred boxes of books plus furniture and equipment were shipped across the sea to London. I like to imagine the many barges crossing the water, laden with the volumes assembled over the years, a fragmented portrait of their owner—a reader now dead, but present in this dismantled representation of his library about to be reshaped in a foreign land. The books were first accommodated in an office building in Millbank; three years later, the University of London agreed to house the collection but not rebuild the oval shelves. On 28 November 1944, the Warburg Institute was finally incorporated in the university, where it still functions today. Fifty-one years later, a copy of Warburg's house was built in Hamburg on the site of his old home on the Heilwigstrasse, and an attempt was made, based on original photographs, to reproduce the shelving and the display of part of his collection, so that anyone who visits the house and stands for a moment in the reading room can feel as if Warburg's mind is still at work among his memorable and changing shelves.

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THE LIBRARY

AS ISLAND

An old man is always a Crusoe.

Francois Mauriac, Nouveaux memoires interieurs

More than three hundred years before the Warburg library crossed the sea to England, another, more mod­est library was shipwrecked on the coast of a desert island somewhere in the South Pacific. On one of the early days of October of the year 1659, Robinson Crusoe returned to the mangled remains of his craft and managed to bring ashore a number of tools and various kinds of food, as well as "several things of less value" such as pens, ink, paper and a small collection of books. Of these books, a few were in Portuguese, a couple were "Popish prayer-books" and three were "very good Bibles." His "dreadful deliverance" had left him terrified of death through starvation, but once the tools and the food had met his material needs he was ready to seek entertainment from the ship's meagre store of books. Robinson Crusoe was the founder—if a reluctant founder—of a new society. And Daniel Defoe, his author, thought it necessary

Robinson Crusoe and Friday.

that at the beginning of a new society there should be books.

We might be tempted to guess what these "sev­eral Portuguese books" were. Probably a copy of Camoes's Lusiads, a fit­ting book in a ship's col­lection; perhaps the ser­mons of the illustrious Antonio Vieira, including the wonderful "Sermon of Saint Anthony to the Fishes," in which Crusoe might have read a defence of the brothers of the savage Friday; most certainly the Peregrination of Fernao Mendes Pinto, which tells of strange voyages through the still myste­rious Orient and which the omnivorous Defoe knew well. We can't tell precisely what those books were, because in spite of keeping a diary in which he dutifully recorded the changes of weather and mood, Crusoe never wrote any more about the books. Perhaps, true to the English conviction that English is the only language a gentleman requires, he was unable to read Portuguese. Whatever the reason, he seems very soon to have forgot­ten the books entirely, and when he leaves the island almost thirty years later, on 11 June 1687, and makes a detailed list of his possessions, he doesn't breathe a word about those anonymous volumes.

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He does tell us, however, of his uses of the Bible. It colours each of his actions, it dictates the meaning of hissufferings, it is the instrument through which he will try, Prospero-like, to make a useful servant out of Friday. Crusoe writes, "I explained to [Friday], as well as I could, why our blessed Redeemer took not on Him the nature of angels but the seed of Abraham, and how for that reason the fallen angels had no share in the redemption; that he came only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel, and the like." And he adds, with disarming frankness, "I had, God knows, more sincerity than knowledge in all the methods I took for this poor creature's instruction."

For Crusoe the book is not only an instrument of instruction but also one of divination. Some time later, sunk in despair, trying to understand his pitiful condi­tion, he opens the Bible and finds this sentence: "I will never, never leave thee, nor forsake thee," and immedi­ately it seems to him that these words are meant for his eyes especially. On that faraway coast, starting over with a few odds and ends from society's ruins—seeds, guns and the Word of God—he constructs a new world at whose centre the Holy Bible shines its fierce and ancient light.

We can live in a society founded on the book and yet not read, or we can live in a society where the book is merely an accessory and be, in the deepest, truest sense, a reader. As a society the Greeks, for instance, cared lit­tle for books, and yet individually they were assiduous readers.²³³ Aristotle, whose books (as we know them today) were probably lecture notes taken down by his students, read voraciously, and his own library was the first in ancient Greece of which there is any certain information.²³⁴ Socrates—who despised books because he thought they were a threat to our gift of memory, and never deigned to leave a written word—chose to read the speech of the orator Lycias, not to hear it recited by the enthusiastic Phaedrus.²³⁵ Crusoe would perhaps have elected to have the text recited to him, if he'd been given the choice. Even though this representative of a book- centred Judeo-Christian society "read daily the Word of God," as he tells us himself, Crusoe was not a keen reader of the Bible, his Book of Power (to borrow Luther's phrase). He consulted it daily—as he would have consulted the Internet had it existed, and allowed himself to be guided by it. But he did not make the Word his, as Saint Augustine insisted we must do, "incarnat­ing" the written text.²³⁶ He merely accepted society's reading of it. Had Crusoe been shipwrecked at the end of our millennium, it is easy to imagine him rescuing from the ship not the Book of Power but a PowerBook.

What distinguishes Crusoe from Defoe, that avid reader, since they are both members of the society of the book? What distinguishes someone for whom a book is powerful or prestigious, but who can be content with no books or with only one single emblematic volume, from a reader of books individually chosen and now person­ally meaningful? There is an unbridgeable chasm between the book that tradition has declared a classic and the book (the same book) that we have made ours through instinct, emotion and understanding: suffered through it, rejoiced in it, translated it into our experience and (notwithstanding the layers of readings with which a book comes into our hands) essentially become its first discoverers, an experience as astonishing and unexpected as finding Friday's footprint on the sand. "The songs of Homer," declared Goethe, "have the power to deliver us, if only for brief moments, from the fearsome load with which tradition has weighed us down over many thousands of years."²³⁷ To be the first to enter Circe's cave, the first to hear Ulysses call himself Nobody, is every reader's secret wish, granted over and over, gener­ation after generation, to those who open the Odyssey for the first time. This modest jus primae noctis, or "first- night rights," assures for the books we call classics their only useful immortality.

There are two ways of reading the much-quoted verse of Ecclesiastes, "Of making many books there is no end."²³⁸ We can read it as an echo of the words that follow—"and much study is a weariness of the flesh"— and we can shrug at the impossible task of reaching the end of our library; or we can read it as a jubilation, a prayer of thanks for the bounty of God, so that the con­necting "and" reads as "but": "but much study is a weariness of the flesh." Crusoe chooses the first read­ing; Aristotle (and his descendants down to Northrop Frye) the second. Beginning some lost afternoon in Mesopotamia, countless readers have persevered in picking their way through "many books," in spite of the "weariness of the flesh." Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate. Libraries are the vaults and treasure chests of those charms.

These two kinds of readers are, of course, not the only possible ones. At the other extreme from Crusoe—the man whose library consists of one venerated Book and a few other books he doesn't read—sits the reader for whom every book in his library is open to reprimand, the reader who believes that any interpretive reading must be erroneous. Discipline, not pleasure, dictates such readers' craft, and they sometimes find occupations in the seats of academia, or the customs office.

One evening of 1939, in Buenos Aires, Borges and two of his friends, the writers Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, decided to immortalize this punctilious censor. The three were extraordinarily eclectic readers. In Bioy and Silvina's library (a large, decrepit hall in a nineteenth-century apartment overlooking one of the loveliest parks in the city) they talked about books, put together anthologies, attempted translations into Spanish, defended with passion their personal choices and mocked with equal passion the authors they disliked. They complemented one another: Borges preferred the epic genre and the philosophical fantastic story; Bioy the psychological novel and social satire; Silvina, lyrical poetry and the literature of the absurd. Together, their reading covered every style and every genre.

Sometimes they played at making up stories. One of these inventions (which was never finished) concerned a young literary enthusiast who seeks out the work of an older writer who, before his death, acquired a reputation for unsurpassed refinement and stylistic perfection. Unable to find more than a few unappealing texts, the enthusiast travels to the writer's home and, among the dead man's papers, discovers a curious list of "Things to avoid in literature":²³⁹

~ psychological curiosities and paradoxes: murders through kind­ness, suicides through contentment; ~ surprising interpretations of certain books and characters: the

misogyny of Don Juan, etc.; ~ twin protagonists too obviously dissimilar: Don Quixote and

Sancho, Sherlock Holmes and Watson; ~ novels with identical twin characters, like Bouvard and Pecuchet. If the author invents a trait for one, he is forced to invent an equivalent trait for the other; ~ characters depicted through their peculiarities, as in Dickens; ~ anything new or astonishing. Civilized readers are not amused by

the discourtesy of a surprise; ~ idle games with time and space: Faulkner, Borges, etc.; ~ the discovery in a novel that the real hero is the prairie, the

jungle, the sea, the rain, the stock market; ~ poems, situations, characters with which the reader might—God

forbid!—identify; ~ phrases that might become proverbs or quotations; they are

incompatible with a coherent book; ~ characters likely to become myths; ~ chaotic enumeration;

~ a rich vocabulary. Synonyms. Le mot juste. Any attempt at precision; ~ vivid descriptions, worlds full of rich physical details, as in Faulkner;

~ background, ambiance, atmosphere. Tropical heat, drunkenness,

the voice on the radio, phrases repeated like a refrain; ~ meteorological beginnings and endings. Pathetic fallacies. "Le

vent se leve! Il faut tenter de vivre!"; ~ any metaphors. Particularly visual metaphors. Even more particu­larly, metaphors drawn from agriculture, seamanship, banking. As in Proust; ~ anthropomorphism;

~ books that parallel other books. Ulysses and the Odyssey; ~ books that pretend to be menus, photo albums, road maps, con­cert programs;

~ anything that might inspire illustrations. Anything that might inspire a film;

~ the extraneous: domestic scenes in detective novels. Dramatic

scenes in philosophical dialogues; ~ the expected. Pathos and erotic scenes in love stories. Puzzles

and crimes in detective stories. Ghosts in supernatural stories; ~ vanity, modesty, pederasty, no pederasty, suicide.

At the end of this reader's demands lies, of course, the absence of any literature.

Happily, most readers fall between these two drastic extremes. Most of us neither shun books in veneration of literature, nor shun literature in veneration of books. Our craft is more modest. We pick our way down end­less library shelves, choosing this or that volume for no discernible reason: because of a cover, a title, a name, because of something someone said or didn't say, because of a hunch, a whim, a mistake, because we think we may find in this book a particular tale or character or detail, because we believe it was written for us, because we believe it was written for everyone except us and we want to find out why we have been excluded, because we want to learn, or laugh, or lose ourselves in oblivion.

Libraries are not, never will be, used by everyone. In Mesopotamia as in Greece, in Buenos Aires as in Toronto, readers and non-readers have existed side by side, and the non-readers have always constituted the majority. Whether in the exclusive scriptoria of Sumer and medieval Europe, in popular eighteenth-century London or in populist twenty-first-century Paris, the number of those for whom reading books is of the essence is very small. What varies is not the proportions of these two groups of humanity, but the way in which different societies regard the book and the art of reading. And here the distinction between the book enthroned and the book read comes again into play.

If a visitor from the past arrived today in our civilized cities, one of the aspects that might surprise this ancient Gulliver would certainly be our reading habits. What would he see? He would see huge commercial temples in which books are sold in their thousands, immense edi­fices in which the published word is divided and arranged in tidy categories for the guided consumption of the faithful. He would see libraries with readers milling about in the stacks as they have done for cen­turies. He would see them exploring the virtual collec­tions into which some of the books have been mutated, leading the fragile existence of electronic ghosts. Outside, too, the time-traveller would find a host of readers: on park benches, in the subway, on buses and trams and trains, in apartments and houses, everywhere. Our visitor could be excused if he supposed that ours was a literate society.

On the contrary. Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading—once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and sub­versive—is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not con­tribute to the common good. As our visitor would even­tually realize, in our society reading is nothing but an ancillary act, and the great repository of our memory and experience, the library, is considered less a living entity than an inconvenient storage room.

During the student revolts that shook the world in the late 1960s, one of the slogans shouted at the lecturers at the University of Heidelberg was Hier wird nicht zitiert!, "No quoting here!" The students were demanding origi­nal thought; they were forgetting that to quote is to con­tinue a conversation from the past in order to give context to the present. To quote is to make use of the Library of Babel; to quote is to reflect on what has been said before, and unless we do that, we speak in a vacuum where no human voice can make a sound. "To write his­tory is to cite it," declared Walter Benjamin.²⁴⁰ To write the past, converse with history—this was the humanist ideal that Benjamin was echoing, an ideal which Nicholas de Cusa first put forward as early as 1440. In his On Learned Ignorance de Cusa suggested that the earth was not, perhaps, the centre of the universe, and that outer space might be infinite rather than bounded by divine decree, and he proposed the creation of a semi- utopian society that, like the universal library, would contain all humankind, one in which politics and religion would have ceased to be disruptive forces.²⁴¹ It is interest­ing to note that, for the humanists, a correlation existed between the suspicion of unbounded space that belongs to no one, and the knowledge of a wealthy past that belongs to all.

This is, of course, the very reverse of the definition of the World Wide Web. The Web defines itself as a space that belongs to all, and it precludes a sense of the past. There are no nationalities on the Web (except, of course, for the fact that its lingua franca is a watered- down version of English), and there is no censorship (except that governments are finding ways to ban access to certain sites). The world's tiniest book (the New Testa­ment engraved on a five-millimetre-square tablet²⁴²) or the oldest multiple-page codex (six bound sheets of twenty-four—carat gold in the Etruscan language, dating from the fifth century B.C.²⁴³) possesses qualities that cannot be perceived merely through the words it con­tains but must be appreciated in its full and distinct physical presence. On the Web, where all texts are equal and alike in form, they become nothing but phantom text and photographic image.

The past (the tradition that leads to our electronic present) is, for the Web user, irrelevant, since all that counts is what is currently displayed. Compared to a book that betrays its age in its physical aspect, a text called up on the screen has no history. Electronic space is frontierless. Sites—that is to say, specific, self-defined homelands—are founded on it but neither limit nor possess it, like water on water. The Web is quasi- instantaneous; it occupies no time except the nightmare of a constant present. All surface and no volume, all pres­ent and no past, the Web aspires to be (advertises itself as) every user's home, in which communication is possible with every other user at the speed of thought. That is its main characteristic: speed. The Venerable Bede, lamenting the quickness and brevity of our life on earth, compared it to the passage of a bird through a well-lit dining hall, entering from the darkness at one end and exiting through the darkness at the other;²⁴⁴ our society would interpret Bede 's lament as an act of boasting.

Since electronic technology is present in all our fields of leisure and labour, we think of it as all-reaching, and speak of it as if it were to replace every other technology, including the technology of books. Our future paperless society, defined by Bill Gates in a paper book,²⁴⁵ is a soci­ety without history, since everything on the Web is instantly contemporary; for writers, for example, thanks to our word processors, there is no archive of our notes, hesitations, developments and drafts. Walter Benjamin noted, shortly before the rise of Nazism, that "Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self- alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order."²⁴⁶ To this self-alienation we have now added the alienation of our own ideas, and enjoy watching the destruction of our own past. We no longer record the evolution of our intellectual creations. To a future observer, it will appear that our ideas were born fully developed, like Athena from her father's brow—except that, since our historical vocabulary will be forgotten, the cliche will mean nothing.

On 18 January 1949, an American by the name of James T. Mangan filed a charter with the Cook County recorder of Deeds, and under the state of Illinois attorney's author­ity claimed ownership of the whole of space. After giving his vast territory the name of Celestia, Mr. Mangan noti­fied all countries on earth of his claim, warned them not to attempt any trips to the moon and petitioned the United Nations for membership.²⁴⁷ Mr. Mangan's ambi­tious enterprise has now, in a more practical sense, been taken over by multinational corporations. Their methods have been extraordinarily effective. By offering elec­tronic users the appearance of a world controlled from their keyboard, a world in which everything can be "accessed" and everything can be had, as in fairy tales, by a simple tap of the finger, multinational companies have ensured that, on the one hand, users will not protest against being turned into consumers, since they are sup­posedly "in control" of cyberspace; and that, on the other hand, they will be prevented from learning any­thing profound, whether about themselves, their immedi­ate surroundings or the rest of the world. Commenting in 2004 on the usefulness of the Web as a creative tool, the celebrated American comic-strip artist Will Eisner explained that, when he first discovered this electronic medium, he believed it to be an almost magical source of new artistic inventions, but that of late it had become "merely a supermarket to which consumers come to look for the cheapest possible product."²⁴⁸

This sleight of hand is achieved, every time a reader locks onto the Web, by stressing velocity over reflection and brevity over complexity, preferring snippets of news and bytes of facts over lengthy discussions and elaborate dossiers, and by diluting informed opinion with reams of inane babble, ineffectual advice, inaccurate facts and trivial information, made attractive with brand names and manipulated statistics.

But the Web is an instrument. It is not to blame for our superficial concern with the world in which we live. Its virtue is in the brevity and multiplicity of its informa­tion; it cannot also provide us with concentration and depth. The electronic media can assist us (do in fact assist us) in a myriad of practical ways, but not in all, and can't be held responsible for that which they are not meant to do. The Web will not be the container of our cosmopolitan past, like a book, because it is not a book and will never be a book, in spite of the endless gadgets and guises invented to force it into that role. Nor can it be in any useful sense a universal library, in spite of such ambitious programs as the Google project and the earlier Project Gutenberg (PG), which has, since 1971, placed some ten thousand texts on the Web—many of which are duplicates, and many more unreliable, having been hastily scanned and badly checked for typographical errors. In 2004 the English critic Paul Duguid remarked, "A brief, critical encounter suggests . . . that while in many ways PG does resemble—and improve on—con­ventional libraries, it also resembles a church jumble-sale bookstall, where gems and duds are blessed alike by the vicar because all have been donated."²⁴⁹

Neither will the Web lend us bed and board in our passage through this world, because it is neither a resting place nor a home, neither Circe's cave nor Ithaca. We alone, and not our technologies, are responsible for our losses, and we alone are to blame when we deliberately choose oblivion over recollection. We are, however, adroit at making excuses and dreaming up reasons for our poor choices.

The Abnaki people of North America believed that a special group of deities, the Oonagamessok, presided over the making of petroglyphs, and they explained the gradual disappearance of these rock engravings by say­ing that the gods were angry because of the lack of atten­tion accorded them since the arrival of the whites.²⁵⁰ The petroglyphs of our common past are fading not because of the arrival of a new technology but because we are no longer moved to read them. We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands and thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues. The world, as Crusoe discovered, is always large enough to accom­modate one more marvel. Being a cosmopolitan today may mean being eclectic, refusing to exclude one tech­nology for the sake of another. Our tendency to build walls is useful only to provide a starting point for self- definition, walls that contain the bed in which we are born, in which we dream, we breed and we die; but out­side the walls lies Siddhartha's realization that all human beings grow old, all are prone to nightmare and disease, and all must ultimately come to the same implacable end. Books endlessly repeat that one same story.

Among the libraries' new incarnations are some that dispense with (or cannot afford) new technologies. In 1990 the Colombian Ministry of Culture set up an organization of itinerant libraries that would take books to the farthest corners of the country.²⁵¹ While library- buses had been in place since 1982 in the districts sur­rounding Bogota, the government deemed it important to reach the inhabitants of the more distant rural regions. For this purpose, large green carrier bags with capacious pockets, that could easily be folded into con­venient packages, were devised to transport books on donkeys' backs up into the jungle and the sierra. Here the books are left for several weeks in the hands of a teacher or village elder who becomes, de facto, the librarian in charge. The bags are unfolded and hung from a post or a tree, allowing the local population to browse and choose. Sometimes the librarian reads aloud to those who have not learned to read for themselves; occasionally a member of a family who has attended school reads to the others. "That way," explained one of the villagers in an interview, "we can know what we don't know and pass it on to others." After the allotted period, a new batch is sent to replace the previous one. Most of the books are technical works, agricultural handbooks and manuals on water filtration, collections of sewing patterns and veterinary guides, but a few nov­els and other literary works are included. According to one librarian, the books are always safely accounted for. "I know of only one instance in which a book was not returned," she told me. "We had taken, along with the usual practical titles, a Spanish translation of the Iliad. When the time came to exchange it, the villagers refused to give it back. We decided to make them a present of it, but we asked them why they wanted to keep that partic­ular title. They explained that Homer's story exactly reflected their own: it told of a wartorn country in which mad gods wilfully decide the fate of humans who never know exactly what the fighting is about, or when they will be killed."²⁵²

As those remote Colombian readers know, our exis­tence flows, like an impossible river, in two directions: from the endless mass of names, places, creatures, stars, books, rituals, memories, illuminations and stones we call the world to the face that stares at us every morning from the depth of a mirror; and from that face, from that body which surrounds a centre we cannot see, from that which

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One of the "donkey-libraries" of the Colombian rural areas.

names us when we say "I," to everything that is Other, outside, beyond. A sense of who we are individually, cou­pled with a sense of being citizens, collectively, of an inconceivable universe, lends something like meaning to our life—a meaning put into words by the books in our libraries.

It is likely that libraries will carry on and survive, as long as we persist in lending words to the world that sur­rounds us, and storing them for future readers. So much has been named, so much will continue to be named, that in spite of our foolishness we will not give up this small miracle that allows us the ghost of an understanding. Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possi­bility of illumination. It may be that there is no book, however well written, that can remove an ounce of pain from the tragedy of Iraq or Rwanda, but it may also be that there is no book, however foully written, that does not allow an epiphany for its destined reader. Robinson Crusoe explains, "It may not be amiss for all people who shall meet my story to make this just observation from it, viz., how frequently in the course of our lives, the evil which in itself we seek most to shun, and which, when we are fallen into it, is the most dreadful to us, is often­times the very same means or door of our deliverance, by which alone we can be raised again." This, of course, is not Crusoe speaking, but Defoe—the reader of so many books.

Histories, chronologies and almanacs offer us the illusion of progress, even though, over and over again, we are given proof that there is no such thing. There is transformation and there is passage, but whether for better or for worse merely depends on the context and the observer. As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted a skill that has become subordinate to principles of mindless financial profit or mechanical efficiency, a skill for which governments care almost nothing. We have gone from one scale of values to the other many times, and will no doubt do so again. We can't be spared this erratic course, which seems to be an intrinsic part of our human nature, but we can at least sway with the knowledge of our swaying, and with the conviction that at one point or another our skill will once again be recognized as of the essence. The library of Robinson Crusoe—made up of just the Good Book— was not merely an idol or a prop but his new society's essential tool, his way of lending order to the universe.

The Apostle Paul (the only apostle not to have known Jesus face to face) would boldly say to those he encoun­tered, men and women seeking the Scriptures, "Do you seek a proof of Christ speaking in me?," knowing that since he had read the Word, the Word was now lodged inside him, even if he had not met the Author; that he had become the Book, the Word made flesh, through that little bit of the divine that the craft of reading allows to all those who seek to learn the secrets held by a page. This is the wisdom of the Essene sect, the devout people who gave us, so many centuries ago, the Dead Sea scrolls: "We know that the body is corruptible and the stuff of which it is made impermanent. But we also know that the soul [and I, the scrolls' future reader, will inter­ject, "the book,"] is immortal and imperishable."

THE LIBRARY

AS SURVIVAL

"I lived off art, I lived off love, I never harmed a living soul. . . . Why then, Lord, Why do You reward me thus?"

Puccini, Tosca, Act II

Like the Dead Sea scrolls, like every book that has come down to us from the hands of distant readers, each of my books holds the history of its survival. From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.

A few years ago, in a stand at the Berlin flea market, I found a thin black book bound in hard cloth covers that bore no inscription whatsoever. The title page, in fine Gothic lettering, declared it to be a Gebet-Ordnung fur den Jugendgottesdienst in derju.difich.en Gemeinde zu Berlin (Sabbath-Nachmittag) [Order of Prayer for Youth Ser­vice in the Jewish Community of Berlin (Sabbath- Evening)]. Among the prayers is included one "for our king, Wilhelm 11, Kaiser of the German Realm" and his "Empress and Queen Auguste-Victoria." This was the eighth edition, printed by Julius Gittenfeld in Berlin in 1908, and had been bought at the bookstore of C. Boas

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The German prayer book printed in Berlin in 1908.

Nachf. on Neue FriedrichstraBe 69, "at the corner of KlosterstraBe," a corner that no longer exists. There was no indication of the name of the owner.

A year before the book was printed, Germany had refused the armament limitations proposed by the Hague Peace Conference; a few months later, the expro­priation law decreed by Reichskanzler and PreuBischer Ministerprasident Furst Bernhard von Bulow authorized further German settlements in Poland; in spite of hardly ever being used against Polish landowners, this law granted Germany early territorial rights that in turn, in June 1940, allowed the establishment of a concentration camp in Auschwitz. The original owner of the Gebet- Ordnung probably bought or was given the book when he was thirteen years old, the age at which he would have his bar mitzvah and be permitted to join in synagogue prayers. If he survived the First World War, he would have been thirty-eight on the birth of the Third Reich in 1933; if he stayed on in Berlin, it is likely that he was deported, like so many other Berlin Jews, to Poland.²⁵³ Perhaps he had time to give the prayer book to someone before being taken away; perhaps he hid it, or left it behind with other books he had collected.

After the Nazis began their looting and destruction of the Jewish libraries, the librarian in charge of the Sholem Aleichem Library in Biala Podlaska decided to save the books by carting away, day after day, as many as he and a colleague could manage, even though he believed that very soon "there would be no readers left." After two weeks the holdings had been moved to a secret attic, where they were discovered by the historian Tuvia Borzykowski long after the war ended. Writing about the librarian's action, Borzykowski remarked that it was carried out "without any consideration as to whether anyone would ever need the saved books":²⁵⁴ it was an act of rescuing memory per se. The universe, the ancient cabbalists believed, is not contingent on our reading it; only on the possibility of our reading it.

With the emblematic book-burning in a square on Unter den Linden, opposite the University of Berlin, on the evening of 10 May, 1933, books became a specific tar­get of the Nazis. Less than five months after Hitler became chancellor, the new propaganda minister of the Reich, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, declared that the public burning of books by authors such as Heinrich Mann, Stefan Zweig, Freud, Zola, Proust, Gide, Helen Keller and H.G. Wells allowed "the soul of the German people again to express itself. These flames not only illuminate the final end of an old era; they also light up the new."²⁵⁵ The new era proscribed the sale or circulation of thou­sands of books, in either shops or libraries, as well as the publishing of new ones. Volumes commonly kept on sitting-room shelves because they were prestigious or entertaining became suddenly dangerous. Private hold­ings of the indexed books were prohibited; many books were confiscated and destroyed. Hundreds of Jewish libraries throughout Europe were burnt down, both per­sonal collections and public treasure-houses. A Nazi cor­respondent gleefully reported the destruction of the famous library of the Lublin Yeshiva in 1939:

For us it was a matter of special pride to destroy the Talmudic Academy, which was known as the greatest in Poland. . . . We threw the huge talmudic library out of the building and carried the books to the market place, where we set fire to them. The fire lasted twenty hours. The Lublin Jews assembled around and wept bitterly, almost silencing us with their cries. We summoned the military band, and with joyful shouts the soldiers drowned out the sounds of the Jewish cries.²⁵⁶

At the same time, the Nazis decided to spare a number of books for commercial and archival purposes. In 1938 Alfred Rosenberg, one of the principal Nazi theoreti­cians, proposed that Jewish collections, including both secular and religious literature, should be preserved in an institute set up to study "the Jewish question." Two years later, the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage was opened in Frankfurt am Main. To procure the necessary material, Hitler himself authorized Rosenberg to create a task force of expert German librarians, the notorious ERR, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg.²⁵⁷ Among the confiscated collections incorporated to the institute were those of the rabbinical seminaries of Breslau and Vienna, the Hebraica and Judaica departments of the Frankfurt Municipal Library, the Collegio Rabbinico in Rome, the Societas Spinoziana in The Hague and the Spinoza Home in Rijnsburg, the Dutch publishing companies Querido, Pegazus and Fischer-Berman,²⁵⁸ the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, Beth Maidrash Etz Hayim, the Israelitic seminary of Amsterdam, the Portuguese Israelitic seminary and the Rosenthaliana, Rabbi Moshe Pessah in Volos, the Strashun Library in Vilna (the grandson of the founder committed suicide when ordered to assist with the cata­loguing), libraries in Hungary (a parallel institute on "the Jewish question" was set up in Budapest), libraries in Denmark and Norway and dozens of libraries in Poland (especially the great library of the Warsaw syna­gogue and of the Institute for Jewish Studies). From these vast hoards, Rosenberg's henchmen selected the books to be sent to his institute; all others were destroyed. In February 1943 the institute issued the fol­lowing directives for the selection of library material: "all writings which deal with the history, culture, and nature of Judaism, as well as books written by Jewish authors in languages other than Hebrew and Yiddish, must be shipped to Frankfurt." But "books in Hebrew script (Hebrew or Yiddish) of recent date, later than the year 1800, may be turned to pulp; this applies also to prayer books, MemorbUcher, and other religious works in the German language."²⁵⁹ Regarding the many Torah scrolls, it was suggested that "perhaps the leather can be put to use for bookbinding." Miraculously, my prayer book escaped.

Seven months after these directives were given, in September 1943, the Nazis set up a "family camp" as an extension of the Auschwitz precinct, in the birch forest of Birkenau, which included a separate block, "number 31," built especially for children. It was designed to serve as proof to the world that Jews deported to the east were not being killed. In fact, they were allowed to live six months before being sent on to the same fate as the other deported victims. Eventually, having served its purpose as propaganda, the "family camp" was permanently closed.²⁶⁰

While it lasted, Block 31 housed up to five hundred children together with several prisoners appointed "counsellors," and in spite of the severe surveillance it possessed, against all expectations, a clandestine chil­dren's library. The library was minuscule; it consisted of eight books, which included H.G. Wells's A Short History of the World, a Russian school textbook and an analytical geometry text. Once or twice an inmate from another camp managed to smuggle in a new book, so that the number of holdings rose to nine or ten. At the end of each day, the books, together with other valuables such as medicines and bits of food, would be entrusted to one of the older girls, whose responsibility it was to hide them in a different place every night. Paradoxically, books that were banned throughout the Reich (those by H.G. Wells, for instance) were sometimes available in concentration camp libraries.

Although eight or ten books made up the physical col­lection of the Birkenau children's library, there were oth­ers that circulated through word of mouth alone. Whenever they could escape surveillance, the counsel­lors would recite to the children books they had them­selves learned by heart in earlier days, taking turns so that different counsellors "read" to different children every time; this rotation was known as "exchanging books in the library."²⁶¹

It is almost impossible to imagine that under the unbear­able conditions imposed by the Nazis, intellectual life could still continue. The historian Yitzhak Schipper,

Liberation ofthe survivors ofthe Birkenau Concentration Camp.

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who was writing a book on the Khazars while he was an inmate of the Warsaw ghetto, was asked how he did his work without being able to sit and research in the appro­priate libraries. "To write history," he answered, "you need a head, not an ass."²⁶²

There was even a continuation of the common, every­day routines of reading. This persistence adds to both the wonder and the horror: that in such nightmarish cir­cumstances men and women would still read about Hugo's Jean Valjean and Tolstoy's Natasha, would fill in request cards and pay fines for late returns, would dis­cuss the merits of a modern author or follow once again the cadenced verses of Heine. Reading and its rituals became acts of resistance; as the Italian psychologist Andrea Devoto noted, "everything could be treated as resistance because everything was prohibited."²⁶³

In the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, a copy of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain was passed around among the inmates. One boy remembered the time he was allotted to hold the book in his hands as "one of the highlights of the day, when someone passed it to me. I went into a corner to be at peace and then I had an hour to read it."²⁶⁴ Another young Polish victim, recalling the days of fear and discouragement, had this to say: "The book was my best friend, it never betrayed me; it comforted me in my despair; it told me that I was not

alone."²⁶⁵

"Any victim demands allegiance," wrote Graham Greene,²⁶⁶ who believed it was the writer's task to champion victims, to restore their visibility, to set up warnings that, by means of an inspired craft, will act as touchstones for something approaching understanding. The authors of the books on my shelves cannot have known who would read them, but the stories they tell foresee or imply or witness experiences that may not yet have taken place.

Because the victim's voice is all-important, oppressors often attempt to silence their victims: by literally cutting out their tongues, as in the case of the raped Philomela in Ovid, and Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, or by secreting them away, as the king does with Segismundo in Calderon's Life Is a Dream, or as Mr. Rochester does to his mad wife in Jane Eyre, or by simply denying their stories, as in the professorial addendum in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. In real life, victims are "disappeared," locked up in a ghetto, sent to prison or a torture camp, denied credibility. The literature on my shelves tells over and over again the victim's story, from Job to Desdemona, from Goethe's Gretchen to Dante's Francesca, not as mirror (the German surgeon Johann Paul Kremer warned in his Auschwitz diary, "By com­parison, Dante's inferno seems almost a comedy"²⁶⁷) but as metaphor. Most of these stories would have been found in the library of any educated German in the 1930s. What lessons were learned from those books is another matter.

In Western culture, the archetypal victim is the Trojan princess Polyxena. The daughter of Priam and Hecuba, she was supposed to marry Achilles but her brother Hector opposed the union. Achilles stole into the temple of Apollo to catch sight of her, but was discovered there and murdered. According to Ovid, after the destruction of Troy the spirit of Achilles appeared to the victorious Greeks as they were about to embark, and demanded that the princess be sacrificed to him. Accordingly, she was dragged to Achilles' tomb and killed by Achilles' son Neoptolemus. Polyxena is perfect for the victim's role: innocent of cause, innocent of blame, innocent of bene­fiting others with her death, a blank page haunting the reader with unanswered questions. Arguments, however specious, were made by the Greeks to find reasons for the ghost's request, to justify compliance with the sacri­fice, to excuse the blade that Achilles' son drove into her bared breast. But no argument can convince us that Polyxena's death was merited. The essence of her vic- timhood—as of all victimhood—is injustice.

My library witnesses the injustice suffered by Polyxena, and all fictional phantoms who lend voice to countless ghosts who were once solid flesh. It does not clamour for revenge, another constant subject of our lit­eratures. It argues that the strictures that define us as a social group must be constructive or cautionary, not wil­fully destructive, if they are to have any sane collective meaning—if the injury to a victim is to be seen as an injury to society as a whole, in recognition of our com­mon humanity. Justice, as the English dictum has it, must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. Justice must not seek a private sense of satisfaction, but must publicly lend strength to society's self-healing impulse to learn. If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.

A Hasidic legend collected by Martin Buber tells of a man who took God to trial. In Vienna, a decree was issued that would make the difficult life of the Jews of Polish Galicia even harder. The man argued that God should not turn his people into victims, but should allow them to toil for him in freedom. A tribunal of rabbis agreed to consider the man's arguments, and considered, as was proper, that both plaintiff and defendant retire dur­ing their deliberations. "The plaintiff will wait outside; we cannot ask You, Lord of the Universe, to withdraw, since your glory is omnipresent. But we will not allow You to influence us." The rabbis deliberated in silence and with their eyes closed. Later that evening, they called the man and told him their verdict: his argument was just. At that very same hour, the decree was cancelled.²⁶⁸

In Polyxena's world, the outcome is less happy. God, the gods, the Devil, nature, the social system, the world, the primum mobile, refuses to acknowledge guilt or responsibility. My library repeats again and again the same question: Who makes Job endure so much pain and loss? Who is to blame for Winnie's sinking in Beckett's Happy Days? Who relentlessly destroys the life of Gervaise Macquart in Zola's L'assommoir? Who victimizes the protagonists of Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance?

Throughout history, those confronted with the unbear­able account of the horrors they have committed— torturers, murderers, merciless wielders of power, shame­lessly obedient bureaucrats—seldom answer the question "why?" Their impassive faces reject any admission of guilt, reflect nothing but a refusal to move from the past of their deeds into the consequences. Yet the books on my shelves can help me imagine their future. According to Victor Hugo, hell takes on different shapes for its dif­ferent inhabitants: for Cain it has the face of Abel, for Nero that of Agrippina.²⁶⁹ For Macbeth, hell bears the face of Banquo; for Medea, that of her children. Romain

Gary dreamt of a certain Nazi officer condemned to the constant presence of the ghost of a murdered Jewish clown.²⁷⁰

If time flows endlessly, as the mysterious connections between my books suggest, repeating its themes and dis­coveries throughout the centuries, then every misdeed, every treason, every evil act will eventually find its true consequences. After the story has stopped, just beyond the threshold of my library, Carthage will rise again from the strewn Roman salt. Don Juan will confront the anguish of Dona Elvira. Brutus will look again on Caesar's ghost, and every torturer will have to beg his victim's pardon in order to complete time's inevitable circle.

My library allows me this unrealizable hope. But for the victims, of course, no reasons, literary or other, can excuse or expiate the deeds of their torturers. Nick Caistor, in his introduction to the English edition of Nunca mas, the report on the "disappeared" during the Argentinian military dictatorship, reminds us that the sto­ries that ultimately reach us are but the reports of the survivors. "One can only speculate," says Caistor, "as to what accounts of atrocity the thousands of dead took with them to their unmarked graves."²⁷¹

It is difficult to understand how people continue to carry out the human gestures of everyday life when life itself has become inhuman; how, in the midst of starving and sickness, beatings and slaughter, men and women persist in civilized rituals of courtesy and kindness, inventing stratagems of survival for the sake of a speck of something loved, for one book rescued out of thousands, one reader out of tens of thousands, for a voice that will echo until the end of time the words of Job's servant: "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee." Throughout history, the victor's library stands as an emblem of power, repository of the official version, but the version that haunts us is the other, the version in the library of ashes. The victim's library, abandoned or destroyed, keeps on asking, "How were such acts possible?" My prayer book belongs to that questioning library.

After the European crusaders, following a forty-day siege, took the city of Jerusalem on 15 July, 1099, slaugh­tering the Muslim men, women and children and burning alive the entire Jewish community inside the locked syna­gogue, a handful of Arabs who had managed to escape arrived in Damascus, bringing with them the Koran of 'Uthman, one of the oldest existing copies of the holy book. They believed that their fate had been foretold in its pages (since God's word must necessarily hold all past, present and future events), and that, if only they had been able to read the text clearly, they would have known the outcome of their own narrative.²⁷² History was, for these readers, nothing but "the unfolding of God's will for the world."²⁷³ As our libraries teach us, books can sometimes help us phrase our questions, but they do not necessarily enable us to decipher the answers. Through reported voices and imagined stories, books merely allow us to remember what we have never suffered and have never known. The suffering itself belongs only to the victims. Every reader is, in this sense, an outsider.

Emerging from hell, travelling against Lethe 's current towards recollection, Dante carries with him the sounds of the suffering souls, but also the knowledge

BELOW: Portrait of Jacob Edelstein.

OPPOSITE: A sketch of the library in the Theresienstadt Ghetto, by Alfred Bergel, dated 27 November 1943.

that those souls are being punished for their own avowed sins.²⁷⁴ The souls whose voices resound in our present are, unlike Dante's damned, blame­less. They were tortured and killed for no other reason than their exis­tence, and maybe not even that. Evil requires no reason. How can we contain, between the covers of a book, a useful represen­tation of something that, in its very essence, refuses to be contained, whether in Mann's The Magic Mountain or in an ordinary prayer book? How can we, as readers, hope to hold in our hands the circle of the world and time, when the world will always exceed the margins of a page, and all we can witness is the moment defined by a paragraph or a verse, "choosing," as Blake said, "forms of worship from poetic tales"? And so we return to the question of whether a book, any book, can serve its impossible purpose.

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Perhaps. One day in June 1944, Jacob Edelstein, for­mer elder of the Theresienstadt ghetto, who had been taken to Birkenau, was in his barracks, wrapped in his ritual shawl, saying the morning prayers he had learned long ago from a book no doubt similar to my

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Gebet-Ordnung. He had only just begun when SS Lieutenant Franz Hoessler entered the barracks to take Edelstein away. A fellow prisoner, Yossl Rosensaft, recalled the scene a year later:

Suddenly the door burst open and Hoessler strutted in, accompanied by three SS men. He called out Jacob's name. Jacob did not move. Hoessler screamed: "I am waiting for you, hurry up!" Jacob turned round very slowly, faced Hoessler and said: "Of my last moments on this earth, allotted to me by the Almighty, I am the mas­ter, not you." Whereupon he turned back to face the wall and finished his prayers. He then folded his prayer shawl unhurriedly, handed it to one of the inmates and said to Hoessler: "I am now ready."²⁷⁵

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THE LIBRARY

AS OBLIVION

What has been lost cannot be destroyed or diminished.

Petrarch, On His Own Ignorance

If Night is the child of Chaos, then Lethe or Oblivion is its granddaughter, born of the terrible union between Night and Discord. In the sixth book of the Aeneid, Virgil imagines Lethe as a river whose waters allow the souls on their way to the underworld to forget their for­mer selves, so that they can be born again.²⁷⁶ Lethe allows us oblivion of our former experience and happiness, but also of our prejudices and sorrows.

My library consists half of books I remember and half of books I have forgotten. Now that my memory is not as keen as it used to be, pages fade as I attempt to conjure them up. Some vanish from my experience entirely, unrecalled and invisible. Others haunt me temptingly with a title or an image, or a few words out of context. What novel begins with the words "One spring evening of 1890"? Where did I read that King Solomon used a looking-glass to discover whether the Queen of Sheba had hairy legs? Who wrote that peculiar book Flight into

Darkness, from which I remember only the description of a blind corridor full of birds flapping their wings? In what story did I read the phrase "the lumber room of his library"? What volume showed a burning candle on the cover, with thick crayons on cream-coloured paper? Somewhere in my library are the answers to these ques­tions, but I have forgotten where.

Visitors often ask if I've read all my books; my usual answer is that I've certainly opened every one of them. The fact is that a library, whatever its size, need not be read in its entirety to be useful; every reader profits from a fair balance between knowledge and ignorance, recall and oblivion. In 1930 Robert Musil imagined a devoted librarian who, working in Vienna's Imperial Library, knows every single title in that gigantic assembly. "Do you want to know how I've been able to familiarize myself with every one of these books?" he asks an aston­ished visitor. "Nothing prevents me from telling you: it is because I read none of them!" And he adds, "The secret of every good librarian is never to read anything of all the literature with which he is entrusted, except the titles and the tables of contents. He who puts his nose inside the book itself is lost to the library! . . . Never will he be able to possess a view of the whole!" Hearing these words, Musil tells us, the visitor wants to do one of two things—either burst into tears or light a cigarette—but he knows that within the library walls both options are denied him.²⁷⁷

I have no feeling of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days. They don't require that I pretend to know them all, nor do they urge me to become one of the "professional book-handlers" imagined by Flann O'Brien, who greedily collect books but do not read them, and who could (says O'Brien) earn their living "handling" books for a modest fee, making them look read, annotating the margins with forged comments and inscriptions, and even inserting theatre programs and other ephemera as bookmarks between the virgin leaves.²⁷⁸

Edward Gibbon, commenting on the voluminous library and crowded harem of the Roman emperor Gordian the Younger in the third century A.D., noted approvingly, "Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the produc­tions which he left behind him, it appears that both the one and the other were designed for use rather than for ostentation."²⁷⁹ Of course, no one except a mad prodigy would think of reading through a sixty-two- thousand-volume library, page after page, from Abbott to Zwingli, committing every book to memory, even if such a feat were possible. Gordian must have employed what Samuel Johnson, sixteen centuries later, called the cursory mode of reading. Johnson himself read with no method or discipline, sometimes leaving books uncut and following the text only where the pages fell open. "I do not suppose," he said, "that what is in the pages that are closed is worse than what is in the open pages." He never felt the obligation to read a book to the end or to start at the first page. "If a man begins to read in the middle of a book, and feels an inclination to go on, let him not quit it to go to the beginning. He may perhaps not feel again the inclination." He thought it "strange advice" to urge someone to finish a book once started. "You may as well resolve that whatever men you hap­pen to get acquainted with, you are to keep to them for life," he argued. Nor would he necessarily seek out spe­cific titles, but simply open whatever books he might come upon. Luck, he felt, was as good a counsellor as scholarship.

Johnson's obsessive biographer, James Boswell, men­tions that when Johnson was a boy, "having imagined that his brother had hid some apples behind a large folio upon an upper shelf in his father's shop, he climbed up to search for them. There were no apples; but the large folio proved to be Petrarch, whom he had seen men­tioned, in some preface, as one of the restorers of learn­ing. His curiosity having been thus excited, he sat down with avidity, and read a great part of the book." I am all too familiar with such happy encounters.

The forgotten volumes of my library lead a tacit, unob­trusive existence. And yet, their very quality of having been forgotten allows me, sometimes, to rediscover a certain story, a certain poem, as if it were utterly new. I open a book I think I have never opened before and come upon a splendid line that I tell myself I mustn't for­get, and then I close the book and see, on an endpaper, that my wiser, younger self marked that particular pas­sage when he first discovered it at the age of twelve or thirteen. Lethe does not restore my innocence, but it allows me to be once more the boy who didn't know who had murdered Roger Ackroyd, or who wept over the fate of Anna Karenina. I begin again at the first words, aware that I can't truly begin again; I feel bereft of an experi­ence that I know I've already had, and that I must acquire once more, like a second skin. In ancient Greece, the snake was Lethe 's symbol.

But there are libraries in which oblivion (or the attempt at oblivion) is sought precisely in order to dis­courage rediscovery. The already-mentioned censored libraries, the officious bureaucratic libraries, the schol­arly libraries intent on documenting only that which aca- demia considers to be true—all these belong to a dark and skulking breed. In an amusing book on the values of oblivion, the German scholar Harald Weinrich notes that a certain scientific frame of mind works along the lines of deliberate exclusion, so that, for instance, the library of scientific publications from which the Nobel Prize committee chooses its recipients is limited by the following four rules of enforced forgetting:

That which has been published in a language other than English . . . forget it.

That which has been published in a style different from that of the rewarded article . . . forget it.

That which has not been published in one of the prestigious magazines X, Y or Z ... forget it.

That which was published more than fifty years ago . . . forget it.²⁸⁰

If reading is a craft that allows us to remember the com­mon experience of humankind, it follows that totalitarian governments will try to suppress the memory held by the page. Under such circumstances, the reader's struggle is

against oblivion. After the bombing of Kabul in 2001, Shah Muhammad, a librarian—cum—bookseller who had survived various regimes of intolerance, described his experience to a journalist.²⁸¹ He had opened his store thirty years earlier and had somehow managed to elude the executioners. His inspiration to resist for the sake of his books, he said, came from a verse by Firdausi, the celebrated tenth-century Persian poet, in The Book of Kings: "When facing a great danger, act sometimes as the wolf does, sometimes as the sheep." Meekly Shah Muhammad bound his books in red during the dogmatic Communist regime, and pasted strips of paper over the images of living things during the iconoclastic reign of the Taliban. "But the communists burned my books. . . .

The Afghan bookseller Shah Muhammad Rais in Kabul.

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And then the Taliban burned my books again." Finally, during the last raid on his shop, while the police were pil­ing his books on the pyre, Shah Muhammad abandoned his meek behaviour and went to see the minister of Culture. "You destroy my books," he told him, "maybe you'll destroy me, but there is something you'll never destroy." The minister asked what that might be. "The history of Afghanistan," Shah Muhammad answered. Miraculously, he was spared.

In the United States, attempts to curtail the reading of the black population date from the earliest days of slavery. In order to prevent slaves from rebelling, it was essential that they remain illiterate. If slaves learned to read, it was argued, they would become informed of political, philosophical and religious arguments in favour of abolition, and rise against their masters. Therefore, slaves who learned to read, even the Bible, were often punished with death; it was assumed that, while conversion of the slaves was "convenient,"²⁸² knowledge of the Scriptures was to be acquired only through the eyes of their white masters. The black teacher Booker T. Washington noted that in his child­hood "the great ambition of the older people was to try to learn to read the Bible before they died. With this end in view, men and women who were fifty and seventy-five years old, would be found in night- schools."²⁸³

Not all whites believed that slaves learning to read would necessarily lead to an uprising; there were those who thought that, if they learned to read the Bible, they would become, on the contrary, meek and obedient

BELOW: Portrait of Booker T. Washington.

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OPPOSITE: A postcard showing the Cossitt Library in Memphis.

servants. Even after the American Bible Society began to distribute Bibles to freed slaves in the late 1860s, there were those among free-thinking white educators who believed that education must serve not as a means to intellec­tual freedom, but "as an essential tool to moderate the threat arising from 'an inferior, dangerous addition to the republic.'"²⁸⁴

In the American South, libraries were not open to the black population until the early twentieth century. The first one recorded was the Cossitt Library in Memphis, Tennessee, which agreed to provide the LeMoyne Institute, a school for black children, with a librarian and a collection of books.²⁸⁵ In the Northern states, where public libraries had opened their doors to black readers a few years earlier, the fear of treading forbidden territory was still present as late as the 1950s. The young James Baldwin remembered standing at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, admiring "the stone lions that guarded the great main building of the Public Library." The building seemed to him so vast that he had never yet dared enter it; he was terrified of losing himself in a maze of corridors and marble steps, and never find­ing the books he wanted. "And then everyone," he

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wrote, as if observing himself from the distance of many years, "all the white people inside, would know that he was not used to great buildings, or to so many books, and they would look at him with pity."²⁸⁶

Oblivion can be forced on libraries in many ways—by the happenstances of war, or of displacement. In 1945, shortly before the end of the Second World War, a Russian officer discovered in an abandoned German train station a number of open crates overflowing with Russian books and papers that the Nazis had looted. This, according to the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, was all that was left of the celebrated Turgeniev Library, which the author of Fathers and Sons had founded in Paris in 1875 for the benefit of emigre students, and which the novelist Nina Berberova called "the greatest Russian library in exile."²⁸⁷ And even those volumes have today vanished.

The Yiddish poet Rachel Korn, who spent most of her life, as she described it, "shipwrecked in Canada," said that, after being exiled from her village in East Galicia, she felt like someone "being forced to leave your belongings on a sinking ship." But she resisted what seemed to her "enforced oblivion." "When you have been forced to leave your country," she said, "every library is lost, except the ones you remember. And even those, you have to reread in your mind, over and over again, so that the pages don't keep falling out." Her daughter explained how, shortly after their arrival in Montreal, Korn had obliged her, every night, to go through the poems by Pushkin, by Akhmatova, by Mandelstam, that she had learned by heart, as if they were bedtime prayers. "Sometimes she corrected us and sometimes I corrected her." Those remembered texts were the only library that counted for her in exile.²⁸⁸

Sometimes a library is wilfully allowed to vanish. In April 2003, the Anglo-American army stood by while the National Archives, the Archaeological Museum and the National Library of Baghdad were ransacked and looted. In a few hours, much of the earli­est recorded history of humankind was lost to oblivion. The first surviving examples of writing, dating from six thousand years ago; medieval chronicles that had escaped the pillage of Saddam Hussein's henchmen; numerous volumes of the exquisite collection of Korans kept at the Ministry of Religious Endowment—all dis­appeared, probably forever.²⁸⁹ Lost are the manuscripts lovingly penned by the illustrious Arab calligraphers, for

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The looting of the National Library and State Archives of Baghdad.

whom the beauty of the script had to mirror the beauty of the contents. Vanished are collections of tales like those of the Arabian Nights, which the tenth-century Iraqi book dealer Ibn al-Nadim called evening stories because one was not supposed to waste the hours of the day reading trivial entertainment.²⁹⁰ The official docu­ments that chronicled Baghdad's Ottoman rulers have joined the ashes of their masters. Gone, finally, are the books that survived the Mongol conquest of 1258, when the invading army threw the contents of the libraries into the Tigris to build a bridge of paper that turned the waters black with ink.²⁹¹ No one will ever again follow the years of correspondence that meticulously described dangerous voyages from the past and wonderful cities caught in time. And no one will again consult, in these particular copies, great reference works such as Dawn for the Night-Blind, by the fourteenth-century Egyptian scholar al-Qalqashandi, who, in one of the fourteen vol­umes, explained in detail how each of the letters of Arabic script should be formed, since he believed that what was written would never be forgotten.²⁹²

Though a good number of objects were returned to Iraq in the months following the looting, by the end of 2004 a large proportion of the stolen books, documents and artifacts had not been recovered, in spite of the efforts of Interpol, unesco, icom (International Council of Museums) and several cultural agencies around the world. And many irreplaceable texts and objects were destroyed. "In all, what was recovered makes up less than 50 percent of what was stolen," declared Dr. Donny George, director of the Baghdad Archeological Museum. "More than half of the looted material is still missing, which is a great loss for Iraq and for all of humanity."²⁹³

Luciano Canfora has argued the importance of document­ing not only the history of the disappearance of libraries and books, but the history of the awareness of their disappearance.²⁹⁴ He points out, for example, that in the first century B.C. Diodorus Siculus, commenting on the Greek philosopher Theopompus's chronicles of the campaigns of Philip of Macedon, noted that the entire book consisted of fifty-eight volumes of which "unfortu­nately, five are no longer to be found." Canfora explains that since Diodorus lived most of his life in Sicily, in regretting the loss of Theopompus's five volumes he meant that they were absent from the local collections, probably from the historical library of Taormina. Eight

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Stele with the Code ofHammurabi.

centuries after Diodorus, however, the Byzantine patri­cian Photius, compiler of an encyclopedic bibliography under the title Bibliotheka, or Library, remarked, "We have read the Chronicles of Theopompus, of which only fifty-three volumes have survived." The loss noticed by Diodorus was still true for Photius; that is to say, the awareness of the absence had become part of the work's own history, counterbalancing, in some small measure, the oblivion to which the lost volumes had been condemned.

Trust in the survival of the word, like the urge to for­get what words attempt to record, is as old as the first clay tablets stolen from the Baghdad Museum. To hold and transmit memory, to learn through the experience of others, to share knowledge of the world and of our­selves, are some of the powers (and dangers) that books confer upon us, and the reasons why we both treasure and fear them. Four thousand years ago, our ancestors in Mesopotamia already knew this. The Code of Hammurabi—a collection of laws inscribed on a tall, dark stone stele by King Hammurabi of Babylonia in the eighteenth century B.C., and preserved today in the Louvre Museum—offers us, in its epilogue, an enlight­ened example of what the written word can mean to the common man.

In order to prevent the powerful from oppressing the weak, in order to give justice to the orphans and widows ... I have inscribed on my stele my precious words ... If a man is sufficiently wise to maintain order in the land, may he heed the words I have written on this stele. ... Let the oppressed citizen have the inscriptions read out. . . . The stele will illuminate his case for him. And as he will understand what to expect [from the words of the law], his heart will be set at ease.²⁹⁵

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THE LIBRARY

AS IMAGINATION

It is as easy to dream up a book as it is difficult to put it on paper."

Balzac, Le cabinet des antiques

There are two big sophora trees in my garden, just out­side my library windows. During the summer, when friends are visiting, we sit and talk under them, some­times during the day but usually at night. Inside the library, my books distract us from conversation and we are inclined to silence. But outside, under the stars, talk becomes less inhibited, wider ranging, strangely more stimulating. There is something about sitting outside in the dark that seems conducive to unfettered conversa­tion. Darkness promotes speech. Light is silent—or, as Henry Fielding explains in Amelia, "Tace, madam, is Latin for a candle."²⁹⁶

Tradition tells us that words, not light, came first out of the primordial darkness. According to a Talmudic leg­end, when God sat down to create the world, the twenty- two letters of the alphabet descended from his terrible and august crown and begged him to effect his creation through them. God consented. He allowed the alphabet to give birth to the heavens and the earth in darkness, and then to bring forth the first ray of light from the earth's core, so that it might pierce the Holy Land and illuminate the entire universe.²⁹⁷ Light, what we take to be light, Sir Thomas Browne tells us, is only the shadow of God, in whose blinding radiance words are no longer possible.²⁹⁸ God's backside was enough to dazzle Moses, who had to wait until he had returned to the darkness of the Sinai in order to read to his people their Lord's commandments. Saint John, with praiseworthy econ­omy, summed up the relationship between letters, light and darkness in one famous line: "In the beginning was the Word."

Saint John's sentence describes the reader's experi­ence. As anyone reading in a library knows, the words on the page call out for light. Darkness, words and light form a virtuous circle. Words bring light into being, and then mourn its passing. In the light we read, in the dark we talk. Urging his father not to allow himself to die, Dylan Thomas pressed now famous words on the old man: "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."²⁹⁹ And Othello too, in agony, confuses the light of candles with the light of life, and sees them as one and the same: "Put out the light," he says, "and then put out the light."³⁰⁰ Words call for light in order to be read, but light seems to oppose the spoken word. When Thomas Jefferson intro­duced the Argand lamp to New England in the mid- eighteenth century, it was observed that the conversation at dinner tables once lit by candlelight ceased to be as brilliant as before, because those who excelled in talking now took to their rooms to read.³⁰¹ "I have too much light," says the Buddha, refusing to say another word.³⁰²

In one other practical sense, words create light. The Mesopotamian who wished to continue his reading when night had fallen, the Roman who intended to pursue his documents after dinner, the monk in his cell and the scholar in his study after evening prayers, the courtier retiring to his bedchamber and the lady to her boudoir, the child hiding beneath the blankets to read after cur­few—all set up the light necessary to illuminate their task. In the Archaeological Museum of Madrid stands an oil lamp from Pompeii by whose light Pliny the Elder may have read his last book, before setting off to die in the eruption of a.d. 79. Somewhere in Stratford, Ontario, is a solitary candleholder that dates back (its owner boasts) to Shakespeare's time; it may once have held a candle whose brief life Macbeth saw as a reflection of his own. The lamps that guided Dante's exiled read­ing in Ravenna and Racine 's cloistered reading in Port- Royal, Stendhal's in Rome and De Quincey's in London, all were born of words calling out from between their covers; all were light assisting the birth of light.

In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness, we invent our own stories. Many times, under my two trees, I have sat with friends and described books that were never written. We have stuffed libraries with tales we never felt compelled to set down on paper. "To imagine the plot of a novel is a happy task," Borges once said. "To actually write it is an exaggeration."³⁰³ He enjoyed filling the spaces of the library he could not see with stories he never bothered to write, but for which he sometimes deigned to compose a preface, summary or review. Even as a young man, he said, the knowledge of his impending blindness had encouraged him in the habit of imagining complex volumes that would never take printed form. Borges had inherited from his father the disease that gradually, implacably weakened his sight, and the doctor had forbidden him to read in dim light. One day, on a train journey, he became so engrossed by a detective novel that he carried on read­ing, page after page, in the fading dusk. Shortly before his destination, the train entered a tunnel. When it emerged, Borges could no longer see anything except a coloured haze, the "darkness visible" that Milton thought was hell. In that darkness Borges lived for the rest of his life, remembering or imagining stories, rebuilding in his mind the National Library of Buenos Aires or his own restricted library at home. In the light of the first half of his life, he wrote and read silently; in the gloom of the second, he dictated and had others read to him.

In 1955, shortly after the military coup that overthrew the dictatorship of General Peron, Borges was offered the post of director of the National Library. The idea had come from Victoria Ocampo, the formidable editor of Sur magazine and Borges's friend for many years. Borges thought it "a wild scheme" to appoint a blind man as librarian, but then recalled that, oddly enough, two of the previous directors had also been blind: Jose Marmol and Paul Groussac. When the possibility of the appointment was put forward, Borges's mother suggested that they take a walk to the library and look at the building, but Borges felt superstitious and refused. "Not until I get the job,"³⁰⁴ he said. A few days later, he was appointed. To celebrate the occasion, he wrote a poem about "the

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Jorge Luis Borges at his desk in the Buenos Aires National Library.

splendid irony of God" that had simultaneously granted him "books and the night."³⁰⁵

Borges worked at the National Library for eighteen years, until his retirement, and he enjoyed his post so much that he celebrated almost every one of his birth­days there. In his wood-panelled office, under a high ceiling studded with painted fleurs-de-lys and golden stars, he would sit for hours at a small table, his back towards the room's centrepiece—a magnificent, huge round desk, a copy of one that had belonged to the Prime Minister of France, Georges Clemenceau, that Borges felt was far too ostentatious. Here he dictated his poems and fictions, had books read to him by willing secre­taries, received friends, students and journalists, and held study groups of Anglo-Saxon. The tedious, bureaucratic library work was left to his assistant director, the scholar Jose Edmundo Clemente.

Many of Borges's published stories and essays men­tion books that he invented without bothering to write them out. Among these are the many romances by the fictional Herbert Quain (the subject of an essaylike fiction), who varies one single plot in geometrical pro­gression until the number of plots becomes infinite; the marvellous detective novel The Approach to Al- Mu'tasim, by "the Bombay lawyer Mir Bahadur Ali," supposedly reviewed by the very real Philip Guedalla and Cecil Roberts, and published by the equally real Victor Gollancz in London, with an introduction by Dorothy L. Sayers, under the revised title The Con­versation with the Man Called Al-Mu'tasim: A Game with Shifting Mirrors; the eleventh volume of the First Ency­clopaedia ofTlon, which Herbert Ashe received, shortly before his death, in a sealed and registered parcel from Brazil; the play The Enemies, which Jaromir Hladik left unfinished but was allowed to complete in his mind in a long, God-granted instant before his execution; and the octavo volume of infinite pages, bearing the words "Holy Writ" and "Bombay" on its spine, that (Borges tells us) he held in his hands shortly before retiring from his post as director of the National Library.³⁰⁶

The collecting of imaginary books is an ancient occupa­tion. In 1532 there appeared in France a book signed by the apocryphal scholar Alcofribas Nasier (an anagram of Frangois Rabelais) entitled The horrible and frightening

The Giant Gargantua created by Francois Rabelais.

deeds and accomplishments of the much renowned Pantagruel, King of the Dipsods, son of the great giant Gargantua.³⁰⁷ In the seventh chapter of the sec­ond book, the young Pan- tagruel, having studied "very well" at Orleans, resolves to visit Paris and its university. It is, how­ever, not the learned institution but the Abbey of St. Victor that holds his attention, for there he finds "a very stately and magnifick" library full of the most wonderful books. The catalogue that Rabelais copies for us is five pages long, and includes such marvels as:

The Codpiece of the Law

The Pomegranate of Vice

The mustard-pot of Penance

The Trevet of good thoughts

The Snatchfare of the Curats

The Spectacles of Pilgrims bound for Rome

The Fured Cat of the Sollicitors and Atturneys

The said Authors Apologie against those who alledge that the

Gargantua

Popes mule doth eat but at set times The bald arse or peel'd breech of the widows The hotchpot of Hypocrites The bumsquibcracker of Apothecaries

The Mirrour of basenesse by Radnecu Waldenses

The fat belly of the Presidents

In a letter of advice sent to his son from Utopia, Gargan- tua encourages Pantagruel to make good use of his skills "by which we may in a mortal estate attain to a kinde of immortality." "All the world is full of knowing men," he writes, "of most learned Schoolmasters, and vast Libraries: and it appears to me as a truth, that neither in Plato's time, nor Cicero's, nor Papinian's, there was ever such conveniency for studying, as we see at this day there is. . . . I see robbers, hangmen, freebooters, tapsters, ostlers, and such like, of the very rubbish of the people, more learned now, than the Doctors and Preachers were in my time." The library that Rabelais invents is per­haps the first "imaginary library" in literature. It mocks (in the tradition of his admired Erasmus and Thomas More) the scholarly and monastic world, but, more important, allows the reader the fun of imagining the arguments and plots behind the rollicking titles. On another of his Gargantuan abbeys, that of Theleme, Rabelais inscribed the motto Fays ce que voudra (Do As You Please). On his library at St. Victor he might have written Lys ce que voudra (Read As You Please). I've writ­ten those words over one of the doors of my own library.

Rabelais was born in 1483 or 1484, near the town of Chinon, not far from where I now live. His house was called La Deviniere, or The Soothsayer's House; its original name had been Les Cravandieres, after cravant, meaning "wild goose" in the Touraine dialect. Since geese were used to predict the future, the house 's name was changed to honour the birds' magical gift.³⁰⁸ The

house, the landscape around it, the towns and monu­ments even as far as the thin eleventh-century tower of Marmande that I can see from the end of my garden, became the setting for his gigantic saga. The success of Pantagruel (over four thousand copies sold in the first few months) made Rabelais decide to continue the adventures of his giants. Two years later he published The Very Horrific Life of the Great Gargantua, Father of Pantagruel, and several other volumes of the saga. In 1543 the Church banned Rabelais' books, and published an official edict condemning his work.

Rabelais could read Latin, Greek, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic and several dialects of French; he had studied the­ology, law, medicine, architecture, botany, archaeology and astronomy; he enriched the French language with more than eight hundred words and dozens of idioms, many of which are still used in Acadian Canada.³⁰⁹ His imaginary library is the fruit of a mind too active to stop and record its thoughts, and his Gargantuan epic is a hodgepodge of episodes that allows the reader almost any choice of sequence, meaning, tone and even argument. It is as if, for Rabelais, the inventor of a narrative is not obliged to bring coherence, logic or resolution to the text. That (as Diderot would later make clear) is the task of the reader, the mark of his freedom. The ancient scholastic libraries took for granted the truth of the traditional com­mentaries on the classics; Rabelais, like his fellow human­ists, questioned the assumption that authority equalled intelligence. "Knowledge without conscience," says Gargantua to his son, "is but the ruin of the soul."

The historian Lucien Febvre, in a study of the reli­gious beliefs in Rabelais' time, attempted to describe the

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Rabelais' House in Chinon, France.

writer in sixteenth-century terms. "What was Rabelais like mentally? Something of a buffoon . . . boozing his fill and in the evening writing obscenities? Or perhaps a learned physician, a humanist scholar who filled his prodigious memory with beautiful passages from the ancients ... ? Or, better yet, a great philosopher, acclaimed as such by the likes of Theodore Beza and Louis Le Caron?" Febvre asks, and concludes, "Our ancestors were more fortunate than we are. They did not choose between two images. They accepted them both at the same time, the respectable one along with the other."³¹⁰

Rabelais was able to maintain simultaneously both a questioning spirit, and faith in what he saw as the estab­lished truth. He needed to probe the assertions of fools, and to judge for himself the weight of truisms. The books he read as a scholar, full of the wisdom of the ancients, must have been balanced in his mind by the questions left unanswered and the treatises never written. His own library of parchment and paper was grounded by his imaginary library of forgotten or neglected subjects of study and reflection. We know what books (real books) he carried in his "portable library," a chestful that accompanied him throughout the twenty years of his wanderings in Europe. The list—which left him in con­stant peril of the Inquisition—included Hippocrates' Aphorisms, the works of Plato, Seneca and Lucian, Erasmus's In Praise ofFolly and More's Utopia, and even a dangerous recently published Polish book, the De revolutionibus of Copernicus.³¹¹ The books he invented for Pantagruel are their irreverent but tacit gloss.

The critic Mikhail Bahktin has pointed out that Rabelais' imaginary books have their antecedent in the parodic liturgies and comic gospels of earlier centuries. "The medieval parody," he says, "intends to describe only the negative or imperfect aspects of religion, eccle­siastical organization and scholarly science. For these parodists, everything, without exception, is humorous; laughter is as universal as seriousness, and encompasses the whole of the universe, history, society and concep­tion of the world. Theirs is an all-embracing vision of the world."³¹²

Rabelais' Gargantua was succeeded by a number of imi­tations in the following century. Most popular among these were a series of catalogues of imaginary libraries published (largely as political satires) in England during the Civil War, such as the Bibliotheca Parliamenti of 1653, attributed to Sir John Birkenhead, which included such irreverent titles as Theopoeia, a discourse shewing to us mor­tals, that Cromwel may be reckoned amongst the gods, since he hath put offall humanity.:³¹³ In that same year Sir Thomas Urquhart published the first English translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel, and the learned Sir Thomas Browne composed, in imitation of Rabelais, a tract he called Musaeum Clausum, or, Bibliotheca abscondita: con­taining some remarkable Books, Antiquities, Pictures and Rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living. In this "Closed Museum or Hidden Library" are many strange volumes and curious objects: among them an unknown poem written in Greek by Ovid during his exile in Tomis, a letter from Cicero describing the Isle of Britain, a relation of Hannibal's march from Spain to Italy, a treatise on dreams by King Mithridates, an eight-year- old girl's miraculous collection of writings in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and a Spanish translation of the works of Confucius. Among pictures of "rare objects" Sir Thomas lists "An handsome Piece of Deformity expressed in a notable hard Face" and "An Elephant dancing upon the Ropes with a Negro Dwarf upon his Back."³¹⁴ The clear intention is to mock the popular beliefs of the day, but the result is slightly stilted and far less humorous than its model. Even imaginary libraries can sink under the pres­tige and pompousness of academia.

In one instance both the library space and the book titles were visible, yet the books represented were imaginary. At Gad's Hill (the house he dreamed of as a child, which he managed to buy twelve years before his death in 1870), Charles Dickens assembled a copious library. A door in the wall was hidden behind a panel lined with several rows of false book spines. On these spines Dickens playfully inscribed the titles of apocryphal works of all sorts: Volumes 1 to xix of Hansard's Guide

A wood-carving by Gwen Raverat depicting Sir Thomas Browne inspired by Death.

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to Refreshing Sleep, Shelley's Oysters, Modern Warfare by General Tom Thumb (a famous Victorian circus dwarf), a handbook by the notoriously henpecked Socrates on the subject of wedlock, and a ten-volume Catalogue of Statues to the Duke of Wellington.³¹

Colette, in one of the books of memoirs with which she delighted in scandalizing her readers in the thirties and forties, tells the story of imaginary catalogues com­piled by her friend Paul Masson—a ex—colonial magis­trate who worked at the Bibliotheque Nationale, and an eccentric who ended his life by standing on the edge of the Rhine, stuffing cotton wool soaked in ether up his nose and, after losing consciousness, drowning in barely a foot of water. According to Colette, Masson would visit her at her seaside villa and pull from his pockets

Charles Dickens in his library in Gad's Hill.

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Portrait of Paul Masson.

a portable desktop, a fountain pen and a small pack of blank cards. "What are you doing?" she asked him one day. "I'm working," he ans­wered. "I'm working at my job. I've been ap­pointed to the catalogue section of the Bibliotheque Nationale. I'm making an inventory of titles." "Oh, can you do that from memory?" she marvelled. "From memory? What would be the merit? I'm doing better. I've realized that the Nationale is poor in Latin and Italian books from the fifteenth cen­tury," he explained. "Until chance and erudition fill the gaps, I am listing the titles of extremely interesting works that should have been written. ... At least these titles may save the prestige of the catalogue. . . ." "But if the books don't exist ... ?" "Well," Masson answered with a frivo­lous gesture, "I can't be expected to do everything! "³¹⁶

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Libraries of imaginary books delight us because they allow us the pleasure of creation without the effort of research and writing. But they are also doubly disturb­ing—first because they cannot be collected, and sec­ondly because they cannot be read. These promising treasures must remain closed to all readers. Every one of them can claim the title Kipling gives to the never- to-be-written tale of the young bank clerk Charlie Mears, "The Finest Story in the World."³¹⁷ And yet thehunt for such imaginary books, though necessarily fruitless, remains compelling. What devotee of horror stories has not dreamt of coming upon a copy of the Necronomicon,³¹⁸ the demonic manual invented by H.P. Lovecraft in his dark Cthulhu saga? According to Lovecraft, the Al A^if (to give it its original title) was written by Abdul Alhazred c. 730 in Damascus. In 950 it was translated into Greek under the title Necronomicon by Theodorus Philetas, but the sole copy was burnt by the Patriarch Michael in 1050. In 1228 Olaus translated the original (now lost) into Latin.³¹⁹ A copy of the Latin work is supposedly kept in the library of Miskatonic University in Arkham, "one well known for certain for­bidden manuscripts and books gradually accumulated over a period of centuries and begun in colonial times." Other than the Necronomicon, these forbidden works include "the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the Comte d'Erlette's Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn's De Vermiis Mysteriis, the R'lyeh Text, the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, the Dhol Chants, the Liber Ivoris, the Celaeno Fragments, and many other, similar texts, some of which exist only in fragmentary form, scattered over the globe."³²⁰

Not all imaginary libraries contain imaginary books. The library that the barber and the priest condemn to the flames in the first part of Don Quixote; Mr. Casaubon's scholarly library in George Eliot's Middlemarch; Des Esseintes's languorous library in Huysmans' A rebours; the murderous monastic library in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose ... all these are merely wishful. Given money enough and time, such dream libraries could find a solid reality. The library that Captain Nemo shows

Professor Aronnax in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (with the exception of two books by Aronnax himself, of which only one is given a title, Les grands fonds sous-marins) is one that any wealthy French literary gentleman of the mid-nineteenth century might have acquired. "Here are," says Captain Nemo, "the major works of the ancient and modern masters, that is to say, all the most beautiful creations of humanity in the realms of history, poetry, fiction and science, from Homer to Victor Hugo, from Xenophon to Michelet, from Rabelais to Madame Sand."³²¹ All real books.

Like their brethren of solid wood and paper, not all imaginary libraries are composed only of books. Captain Nemo's treasure trove is enriched by two fur­ther collections, one of paintings and one of "curiosi­ties," according to the custom of European scholars of his time. The duke's wilderness library in As You Like It, made up of "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in every thing,"³²² requires no volumes of paper and ink. Pinocchio, in the nineteenth chapter of Collodi's novel, tries to imagine what he might do if he had a hundred thousand coins and were a wealthy gentleman, and wishes for a beautiful palace with a library "crammed full with candied fruit, cakes, panettoni, almond biscuits and wafers stuffed with

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cream."³²³

The distinction between libraries that have no mate­rial existence, and those with books and papers that we can hold in our hand, is sometimes strangely blurred. There exist real libraries with solid volumes that seem imaginary, because they are born from what Coleridge famously called the voluntary suspension of disbelief.

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Captain Nemo's library, an illustration from the first edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Among them stands the Father Christmas Library in the Provincial Archives of Oulu, Northern Finland, whose other, more conventional holdings go back to the six­teenth century. Since 1950 the Finnish Post's "Santa Claus Postal Service" has been in charge of replying to about six hundred thousand letters received yearly from more than one hundred and eighty countries. Until 1996 the letters were destroyed after being answered, but since 1998 an agreement between the Finnish Postal Services and the provincial authorities has allowed the Oulu Archives to select and preserve a number of the let­ters received every December, mainly, but not exclu­sively, from children. Oulu was chosen because, according to Finnish tradition, Father Christmas lives on Korvantunturi, or Ear Mountain, located in that district.³²⁴ Other libraries deserve to be imaginary for more whimsical reasons—such as the Doulos Evangelical Library, housed in the oldest-serving ocean liner, which tours the world with a cargo of half a million books and a staff of three hundred people; and the minuscule library of Geneytouse, in southwestern France, perhaps the smallest library in the world, lodged in a hut of nine square metres, without water, heating or electricity, founded by Etienne Dumont Saint-Priest, a local farmer passionate about literature and music, who had long dreamt of offering his village a place to read and exchange books.

But not all our libraries come from dreams; some belong to the realm of nightmares. In the spring of 1945, a group of American soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division discovered, hidden in a salt mine near Berchtesgaden, the remains of the library of Adolf Hitler, "haphazardly stashed in schnapps crates with the Reich Chancellery address on them."³²⁵ Of the grotesque collection, only twelve hundred, bearing either the Fuhrer's bookplate or his name, were deemed worth pre­serving in the Library of Congress in Washington, on the third floor of the Jefferson Building. According to the journalist Timothy W. Ryback, these spoils of war have been curiously overlooked by historians of the Third Reich. Hitler's original library has been estimated at sixteen thousand volumes, of which about seven thou­sand were on military history, over a thousand were essays on the arts, almost a thousand were works of pop­ular fiction, several more were tracts of Christian spiri­tuality and a few were pornographic stories. Only a handful of classic novels were included: Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Uncle Tom's Cabin and Don Quixote, as well as most of the adventure stories by Hitler's favourite author, Karl May. Among the volumes

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Hitler's personal bookplate.

kept in the Library of Congress are a French vegetarian cookbook inscribed by its author, Maia Charpentier, to Monsieur Hitler, vegetarien, and a 1932 treatise on chemi­cal warfare explaining the uses of prussic acid, later com­mercialized as Zyklon B. It is difficult to think of constructing, with any hideous accuracy, a portrait of this library's owner. Let there be libraries that the imag­ination condemns simply because of the reputation of their reader.

We lend libraries the qualities of our hopes and night­mares; we believe we understand libraries conjured up from the shadows; we think of books that we feel should exist for our pleasure, and undertake the task of invent­ing them unconcerned about any threat of inaccuracy or foolishness, any terror of writer's cramp or writer's block, any constraints of time and space. The books dreamt up through the ages by raconteurs thus unen­cumbered compose a much vaster library than those resulting from the invention of the printing press—per­haps because the realm of imaginary books allows for the possibility of one book, as yet unwritten, that escapes all the blunders and imperfections to which we know we are condemned. In the dark, under my two trees, my friends and I have shamelessly added to the catalogues of Alexandria entire shelves full of perfect volumes that dis­appeared without trace by morning.

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THE LIBRARY

AS IDENTITY

My library was dukedom enough.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

I keep a list of books that I feel are missing from my library and that I hope one day to buy, and another, more wishful than useful, of books I'd like to have but I don't even know exist. In this second list are A Universal History of Ghosts, A Description of Life in the Libraries of Greece and Rome, a third Dorothy L. Sayers detective novel completed by Jill Paton Walsh, Chesterton on Shakespeare, a Summary ofAverroes on Aristotle, a literary cookbook that draws its recipes from fictional descriptions of food, a translation of Calderon's Life Is a Dream by Anne Michaels (whose style, I feel, would suit Calderon's admirably), a History of Gossip, the True and Uncensored Memoirs of a Publishing Life by Louise Dennys, a well-researched, well-written biography of Borges, an account of what exactly happened during Cervantes's captivity in Algiers, an as-yet-unpublished novel by Joseph Conrad, the diary of Kafka's Milena.

We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reach, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles—a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that, in a similar fashion, the identity of a society, or a national identity, can be mirrored by a library, by an assembly of titles that, practically and symbolically, serves as our col­lective definition.

It was probably Petrarch who first imagined that a public library should be funded by the state.³²⁶ In 1326, after the death of his father, he abandoned his legal studies and entered the Church as a means of pursuing a career in lit­erature, which eventually culminated in his being crowned poet laureate on the Campidoglio in Rome in 1341. During the following years he divided his time between Italy and the south of France, writing and col­lecting books, and acquiring an unparalleled scholarly reputation. In 1353, tired of the squabbles at the papal court at Avignon, Petrarch settled for a time in Milan, then in Padua and finally in Venice. Here he was wel­comed by the chancellor of the republic, who in 1362 obtained for him a palazzo on the Riva degli Schiavoni in return for the bequest of his by now celebrated library.³²⁷ Petrarch agreed on condition that his books be "perfectly preserved ... in some fire- and rain-proof location to be assigned for this purpose." Though he modestly stated that his books were neither numerous nor very valuable, he expressed the hope that "this glorious city will add other books at public expense, and that also private indi­viduals . . . will follow the example. . . . In this fashion it might easily be possible to establish a large and famous library, equal to those of antiquity."³²⁸ His wish was granted several times over. Instead of one national library, Italy boasts eight, two of which (those in Florence and in Rome) act jointly as the central library of the nation.

In Britain, the notion of a national library was late in developing. After the dispersal of the libraries following the dissolution of the monasteries ordered by Henry viii, in 1556 the mathematician and astrologer John Dee, himself the owner of a remarkable collection of books, suggested to Henry's daughter Queen Mary the establish­ment of a national library that might collect the manu­scripts and books "of ancient writers." The proposal was ignored, though repeated during the following reign of Elizabeth 1 by the Society of Antiquaries. A third plan was presented to her successor, James 1, who showed himself agreeable to the idea but died before it could be put into practice. His son, Charles 1, had no interest in the matter, despite the fact that royal librarians were routinely appointed during his reign to look after the haphazard royal collections, though with little inclination or success.

Then in 1694, during the reign of William 111, the clas­sical scholar Richard Bentley was appointed to the post of keeper of the royal books. Shocked by the sorry state of the library, Bentley published, three years later, A proposal for building a Royal Library and establishing it by Act of Parliament, in which he suggested that a new edifice should be erected in St. James's Park for the specific purpose of housing books, and that it should receive an annual grant from Parliament. Though his urging received no answer, Bentley's devotion to the nation's books never ceased. In 1731, when a fire broke out one night in the Cotton Collection (which contained, in addition to the already mentioned Lindisfarne Gospels, two of the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament, the Codex Sinaiticus of the mid- fourth century and the Codex Alexandrinus of the early fifth century), the royal librarian was seen running out into the street "in wig and night-dress, with the Codex Alexandrinus under his arm."³²⁹

As a result of Bentley's proposal, in 1739 Parliament acquired the magnificent books and objects left by Sir Hans Sloane on his death, and later, in 1753, Montagu House in Bloomsbury, to store them. The house had been designed by an architect from Marseilles in the so- called French style, after the first Montagu House had burnt down in 1686, only a few years after its construc­tion, and possessed many rooms suitable for the display of Sloane's treasures, as well as several acres of fine gardens for visitors to stroll in.³³⁰ A few years later, George 11 donated his royal book collection to the library—which was by then called the British Museum. On 15 January 1759, the British Library at the Museum opened its impressive doors. At the king's request, the contents were made available to the general public. "Tho' chiefly designed for the use of learned and stu­dious men, both native and foreigners, in their researches into several parts of knowledge, yet being a national establishment . . . the advantages accruing from it should be rendered as general as possible."

Portrait of Sir Antonio Paniz^i.

During its early years, however, the librarians' main task was not to compile catalogues and seek new titles, but to guide visitors around the museum's collections.³³¹

The hero of the British Library saga is the Italian-born Antonio Pan- izzi, mentioned previ­ously with regard to the shape of the Reading Room. Threatened with arrest in Italy for being a member of the secret carbonari, who opposed Napoleonic rule, the twenty-five-year-old revolutionary had fled to the safety of England. After a brief period as a teacher of Italian, he was named assistant librarian at the British Museum in 1831. A year later he became a British citi­zen, changing his name to Anthony.

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Like his compatriot Petrarch, Panizzi felt that it was the state 's responsibility to fund a national library for the benefit of everyone. "I want," he said in a report dated 14 July, 1836, "a poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity, of following his rational pursuits, of consulting the same authorities, of fathom­ing the most intricate inquiry, as the richest man in the Kingdom, as far as books go, and I contend that Government is bound to give him the most liberal and unlimited assistance in this respect."³³² In 1856 Panizziascended to the post of principal librarian, and through his keen intellectual gifts and his administrative abilities he transformed the institution into one of the world's greatest cultural centres.³³³

To achieve his goal, Panizzi planned and started the library's catalogue; he enforced the 1842 Copyright Act, which required that a copy of every book printed in Great Britain be deposited in the library; he successfully lobbied for an increase in government funds; and by insisting that the staff be recognized as civil servants he greatly bettered the librarians' working conditions, which must have been infernal. The biographer and essayist Edmund Gosse, a good friend of Swinburne, Stevenson and Henry James, was employed in the library in the late 1860s as "one of the humblest of mankind, a Junior Assistant in the Printed Books Department." He described his working space, shortly before Panizzi's improvements, as an overheated, "sin­gularly horrible underground cage, made of steel bars, called the Den . . . a place such as no responsible being is allowed to live in nowadays, where the transcribers on the British Museum staff were immured in a half-light."³³⁴ Panizzi (Gosse depicted him as a "dark little old Italian, sitting like a spider in a web of books")³³⁵ wanted the British Museum library to be one of the finest, best- run libraries in the world, but above all he wanted the "web of books" to be the stronghold of British cultural and political identity. He outlined his vision in the clear­est possible terms:

1st. The attention of the Keeper of the emphatically British library ought to be directed most particularly to British works and to works

relating to the British Empire; its religious, political and literary as well as scientific history; its laws, institutions, descriptions, commerce, arts, etc. The rarer and more expensive a work of this description is, the more reasonable efforts ought to be made to secure it for the library. 2ndly. The old and rare, as well as the critical editions of ancient classics, ought never to be sought for in vain in this collection; nor ought good comments, as also the best translations into modern lan­guages be wanting.

3rdly. With respect to foreign literature, arts and sciences, the library ought to possess the best editions of standard works for crit­ical purposes or for use. The public have, moreover, a right to find in their national library heavy, as well as expensive, foreign works, such as literary journals, transactions of societies, large collections, historical or otherwise, complete series of newspapers, and collec­tions of law and their best interpreters.³³⁶

Panizzi saw the British national library as a portrait of the national soul. Foreign literature and cultural mate­rial were to be collected (he posted agents for this purpose in Germany and in the United States), but mainly for comparison and reference, or to complete a collection. What mattered to Panizzi was that every aspect of British life and thought be represented, so that the library could become a showcase of the nation itself. He was clear as to what a national library should stand for; less obvious was, to his mind, the manner in which it should be used. Since even a national library's capacity to accommodate readers is limited, should such an insti­tution be only one of last resort? Thomas Carlyle com­plained that every Tom, Dick and Harry used the library for purposes totally unconnected with scholar­ship and study. "I believe," he wrote, "there are several people in a state of imbecility who come to read in the British Museum. I have been informed that there are several in that state who are sent there by their friends to pass away the time."³³⁷

Panizzi wanted the library always to be available to every "poor student" wishing to indulge "his learned curiosity." For practical reasons, however, should a national library be available only to those readers (stu­dents or otherwise) who have failed to find the books they need in other public libraries? Should it provide ordinary services to the common reader, or should it function solely as an archive of last resort, holding that which, because of its rarity or uniqueness, cannot be dis­tributed more broadly? Up to 2004 the British Library delivered reader's cards only to those who could prove that the books they were looking for were not available elsewhere, and even then, only to researchers who could provide evidence of their status through letters of refer­ence. Commenting on the "accessibility" program that eliminated this requirement that one be a "researcher," in September 2005 a reader unwittingly echoed Carlyle's complaint: "Every day the library is filled with, among others, people sleeping, students doing their homework, bright young things writing film scripts—in fact, doing almost anything except consulting the library's books."³³⁸

The ultimate function of a national library is still in question. Today, electronic technology can open a national library to most readers in their own homes, and even provide cross-library services; not only is the read­ing space extended well beyond the library's walls, but the books themselves mingle with and complement the holdings of other libraries. For example: I wish to consult a book on the intriguing subject of mermaid mythology, Les Sirenes by Georges Kastner, published in Paris in 1858. I discover that the large municipal library of Poitiers does not possess a copy. My librarian kindly offers to search for the nearest library that might hold one, and discovers (thanks to the electronic cata­loguing system) that the only copy in France is at the Bibliotheque Nationale. Because of its rarity, the book cannot be lent out, but it can be photocopied. The Poitiers library can request that a complete, bound pho­tocopy be made which will enter their holdings, so that I am able to borrow it. The system, though not perfect, allows me access to some of the rarest books in the national holdings—and even beyond, in the stacks of other countries bound by inter-library agreements.

Since Les Sirenes is an old book and not covered by the laws of copyright, it could have been scanned and entered into one of the virtual library systems, so that I could download and print it myself or, for a fee, com­mission a printing from a server. This seemingly new system echoes one established centuries ago by medieval universities, in which a text recommended by a teacher could be copied by scribes who set up shop outside the university walls and sold their services to the students. In order to preserve, as far as possible, the accuracy of clas­sical texts, university authorities devised an ingenious method. Carefully checked manuscripts were lent to "stationers" who, for a fixed tariff or tax, sent them out to be copied, either to obtain texts to sell themselves, or to rent to students too poor to commission copies, who were therefore forced to do the work themselves. The original text (an exemplar) did not go out as a single book, but in sections ( peciae) that were returned to the stationer after being copied; he could then rent them out once again. When the first printing presses were installed, university authorities considered them nothing more than a useful means of producing copies with a lit­tle more speed and accuracy.³³⁹

Lebanon is a country that boasts at least a dozen different religions and cultures. Its national library is a recent acquisition, dating only to 1921, when Viscount Philippe de Tarazi, a Lebanese historian and bibliophile, donated his collection to the state with the precise instructions that it become "the core of what should become the Great Library of Beyrouth." De Tarazi's donation comprised twenty thousand printed volumes, a number of precious manuscripts and the first issues of national newspapers. Three years later, in order to augment the collection, a government decree established a legal deposit system (requiring that a copy of every book printed in the coun­try be submitted), and staffed the library with eight clerks under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education. During the civil war that ravaged the country from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, the National Library was many times bombed and looted. In 1979, after four years of fighting, the government closed the facilities and stored the surviving manuscripts and documents in the vaults of the National Archives. Modern printed books were stored in a separate building between 1982 and 1983, but this site was also heavily bombed, and the books spared by gunfire were damaged by rainwater and insect infestation. At last, after the war ended, and with the assistance of a group of experts from the French Bibliotheque Nationale, plans were drawn up in 1994 to re-establish the surviving collections in a new site.

Visiting Lebanon's rescued books is a melancholy experience. It is obvious that Lebanon still requires much assistance to disinfect, restore, catalogue and put away its collection. The works are stacked in modern rooms in a customs building too near the sea to prevent dampness. A handful of clerks and volunteers page through the piles of print and place the books on shelves; an expert eye will determine which are worth restoring and which must be discarded. In another building, a librarian spe­cializing in ancient texts sifts through the Oriental manu­scripts, some dating from the ninth century, in order to grade the severity of the deterioration, marking each piece with a coloured label, from red (the worst condi­tion) to white (requiring minor repairs). But it is obvious that neither the staff nor the funding suffices for the enormous task.

But there is a hopeful side. A now vacant building that used to house the Faculty of Law of the Lebanese University in Beyrouth has been designated the home of the new National Library, and should soon be open to the public. In her report on the project, read out in May 2004, Professor Maud Stephan-Hachem, advisor to the minister of Culture, pointed out that the library might in fact "help reconcile a plural reality," reweaving all of Lebanon's cultural strands.

The project of a national library for Lebanon has always been defended, supported and favoured by all our intellectual biblio­philes, but up to now each one of them appropriated the project for

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The books of the Lebanon National Library in precarious storage.

himself, lending it his own dreams and his own personal vision of our much embattled culture. It could however become a project of the whole of our society, a public project in which the entire state must have a hand, especially because of its eminently political dimension. It should not be reduced to a mere saving of books, or to the rebuilding of an institution modelled on other such libraries in the world. It is a political project of Lebanese reconciliation, preserv­ing the memory both of the recognition of others, effected con­cretely through inventories and recordings, and of the recognition of the value of their works.³⁴⁰

Can a library reflect a plurality of identities? My own library—set up in a small French village to which it has no visible connection, and made up of fragmentary libraries collected in Argentina, England, Italy, France, Tahiti and Canada during the course of a peripatetic life—proclaims a number of changing identities. I am, in a sense, the library's only citizen, and can therefore claim common bonds with its holdings. And yet many friends have felt that the identity of this ragbag library was at least partly theirs as well. It may be that, because of its kaleidoscopic quality, any library, however personal, offers to whoever explores it a reflection of what he or she seeks, a tantalizing wisp of intuition of who we are as readers, a glimpse into the secret aspects of the self.

Immigrants sometimes gravitate to libraries to learn more about their country of adoption, not only its his­tory and geography and literature, its dates and maps and national poems, but also a general understanding of how the country thinks and organizes itself, how it divides and catalogues the world—a world that includes the immigrant's past. Queens Borough Public Library in New York is the busiest library in the United States, cir­culating over fifteen million books, tapes and videos a year—mainly to an immigrant population, since nearly half the residents of Queens speak a language other than English at home, and more than a third were born in a foreign country. The librarians speak Russian, Hindi, Chinese, Korean, Gujarati and Spanish, and can explain to their new readers how to get a driver's licence or nav­igate the Internet and learn English. The most sought- after titles are translations of American potboilers into the immigrants' own languages.³⁴¹ Queens may not be the cultural repository that Panizzi had in mind for a nation, but it has become one of many libraries that hold up a mirror to the pluralistic, vertiginous, challenging identity of the country and the times.

THE LIBRARY

AS HOME

The universe (which others call the Library). . . .

Jorge Luis Borges, La biblioteca de Babel

Beyond the national library of any nation lies a library greater than all, because it contains each and every one of them: an inconceivably vast and ideal library of all the books ever written, and of those that exist only as possi­bilities, as volumes still to come. This colossal accumula­tion of libraries overshadows any single collection of books and yet is implied in every one of their volumes. My edition of the Odyssey, "translated into English prose by T.E. Shaw" (better known as Lawrence of Arabia), echoes back to Alexandria and to the rigorous commen­taries of Aristarchus, as well as forward to the generous library of Odysseys assembled by George Steiner in Geneva, and to the various pocket editions of Homer an anonymous reader in Montevideo sent to help rebuild the Library of Sarajevo. Each of these readers reads a different Odyssey, and their readings extend the adven­tures of Ulysses well beyond the Fortunate Isles, into infinity.

For me, among all of Ulysses' stories none is as mov­ing as his homecoming. The Sirens, the Cyclops, the sor­ceress and her spells are prodigious wonders, but the old man who weeps at the sight of the remembered shore and the dog who dies of a broken heart at the feet of his remembered master seem truer and more compelling than the marvels. Nine-tenths of the poem consist of sur­prise; the end is recognition.

What is this homecoming? It can be argued that we perceive the world in one of two ways—as a foreign land or as home—and that our libraries reflect both these opposing views. As we wander among our books, picking at random a volume from the shelves and leafing through it, the pages either astound us by their difference from our own experience or comfort us with their similitude. The greed of Agamemnon or the meekness of Kim's Lama are to me utterly foreign; Alice's bewilderment or Sinbad's curiosity reflect again and again my own emotions. Every reader is either a pausing wanderer or a traveller returned.

It's late at night. It's raining heavily. I can't sleep. I wan­der into my library, take a book off its shelf and read. In a faraway castle of broken walls, where the shadows were many and a cold wind breathed through the cracks of the battlements and casements, there lived a count of many years and great renown. His knowledge of the world came mainly from books, and he was certain of his place in history. This aristocratic man claimed the right to be proud because

in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship. Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which their Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of Europe, aye, and of Asia and Africa, too, till the peoples thought that the were-wolves themselves had come. . . . When was redeemed that great shame of my nation, the shame of Cassova [Kosovo], when the flags of the Wallach and the Magyar went down beneath the Crescent; who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground! This was a Dracula indeed!³⁴²