The Library at Night

by Alberto Manguel

  Praise for THE LIBRARY AT NIGHT

  “An eloquent and surprisingly moving tribute not only to libraries, private and public, but to our enduring need for them and for the order they try so hard to impose on a chaotic world…. Manguel does all facets of his subject proud in The Library at Night, celebrating a treasure we so often take for granted. With this wise and tender book, he also creates a treasure of his own.”

  —The Gazette (Montreal)

  “Fluid, rich and consistent.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “Anecdotal, often impassioned, filled with fascinating, out-of-the-way information, this paean to books and to the libraries that house them beckons beguilingly to all bibliophiles.”

  —The Hamilton Spectator

  “The atmosphere in The Library at Night is cultivated, but never stodgy. It’s the ideal companion volume to his international bestseller A History of Reading…. Manguel turns the library, both public and private, into a theatre rich in symbolism and associations.”

  —CBC Arts Online

  “Who better than Alberto Manguel, that globetrotting, multilingual citizen of the world … to pay homage to the library as the centre of civilization? … The Library at Night is filled with odd combinations, unexpected transitions and wandering scraps of esoterica with aphorisms appearing as signposts along the way…. This book is utterly sensitive to the experience of reading…. Manguel, in this and his other books, comes off as quite the raconteur.”

  —Toronto Star

  In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman poet Adbüllatif Çelebi, better known as Latifi, called each of the books in his library “a true and loving friend who drives away all cares.”

  This book is for Craig.

  Contents

  Foreword

  The Library as Myth

  The Library as Order

  The Library as Space

  The Library as Power

  The Library as Shadow

  The Library as Shape

  The Library as Chance

  The Library as Workshop

  The Library as Mind

  The Library as Island

  The Library as Survival

  The Library as Oblivion

  The Library as Imagination

  The Library as Identity

  The Library as Home

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Image Credits

  All that remains of an Athenian library: an inscription stating that opening times are “from the first to the sixth hour” and that “it is forbidden to take works out of the library.”

  FOREWORD

  This roving humor (though not with like success) I have ever had, & like a ranging spaniel, that barks at every bird it sees, leaving his game, I have followed all, saving that which I should, and may justly complain, and truly (for who is everywhere is nowhere) …, that I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method; I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our Libraries, with small profit, for want of art, order, memory, judgement.

  Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

  The starting point is a question.

  Outside theology and fantastic literature, few can doubt that the main features of our universe are its dearth of meaning and lack of discernible purpose. And yet, with bewildering optimism, we continue to assemble whatever scraps of information we can gather in scrolls and books and computer chips, on shelf after library shelf, whether material, virtual or otherwise, pathetically intent on lending the world a semblance of sense and order, while knowing perfectly well that, however much we’d like to believe the contrary, our pursuits are sadly doomed to failure.

  Why then do we do it? Though I knew from the start that the question would most likely remain unanswered, the quest seemed worthwhile for its own sake. This book is the story of that quest.

  Less keen on the tidy succession of dates and names than on our endless collecting efforts, I set off several years ago, not to compile another history of libraries nor to add another tome to the alarmingly extensive collection of bibliotechnology, but merely to give an account of my astonishment. “Surely we should find it both touching and inspiriting,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson over a century ago, “that in a field from which success is banished, our race should not cease to labour.”1

  Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books. I feel an adventurous pleasure in losing myself among the crowded stacks, superstitiously confident that any established hierarchy of letters or numbers will lead me one day to a promised destination. Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts. “A big library,” mused Northrop Frye in one of his many notebooks, “really has the gift of tongues & vast potencies of telepathic communication.”2

  Under such agreeable delusions, I’ve spent half a century collecting books. Immensely generous, my books make no demands on me but offer all kinds of illuminations. “My library,” wrote Petrarch to a friend, “is not an unlearned collection, even if it belongs to someone unlearned.”3 Like Petrarch’s, my books know infinitely more than I do, and I’m grateful that they even tolerate my presence. At times I feel that I abuse this privilege.

  The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned. No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror—at the clutter or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn’t know, the surveillance—and some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, the natives found friendly.

  In my foolhardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian. Sloth and an ill-restrained fondness for travel decided otherwise. Now, however, having reached the age of fifty-six (which, according to Dostoyevsky in The Idiot, is “the age at which real life can be rightly said to begin”), I’ve returned to that early ideal and, though I cannot properly call myself a librarian, I live among ever-increasing bookshelves whose limits begin to blur or coincide with the house itself. The title of this book should have been Voyage around My Room. Regrettably, over two centuries ago, the notorious Xavier de Maistre got there first.

  ALBERTO MANGUEL, 30 January 2005

  THE LIBRARY

  AS MYTH

  Night which Pagan Theology could make the daughter of Chaos, affords no advantage to the description of order.

  Sir Thomas Browne, The Garden of Cyrus

  The library in which I have at long last collected my books began life as a barn sometime in the fifteenth century, perched on a small hill south of the Loire. Here, in the last years before the Christian era, the Romans erected a temple to Dionysus to honour the god of this wine-producing area; twelve centuries later, a Christian church replaced the god of drunken ecstasy with the god who turned his blood into wine. (I have a picture of a stained-glass window showing a Dionysian grapevine growing out of the wound in Christ’s right side.) Still later, the villagers attached to the church a house to lodge their priest, and eventually added to this presbytery a couple of pigeon towers, a small orchard and a barn. In the fall of 2000, when I first saw these buildings which are now my home, all that was left of the barn was a single stone wall that separated my property from a chicken run and the neighbour’s field. According to village legend, before belonging to the barn, the wall was par
t of one of the two castles that Tristan L’Hermite, minister of Louis XI of France and notorious for his cruelty, built for his sons around 1433. The first of these castles still stands, much altered during the eighteenth century. The second burnt down three or four centuries ago, and the only wall left standing, with a pigeon tower attached to its far end, became the property of the church, bordering one side of the presbytery garden. In 1693, after a new cemetery was opened to house the increasing number of dead, the inhabitants of the village (“gathered outside the church doors,” says the deed) granted the incumbent priest permission to incorporate the old cemetery and to plant fruit trees over the emptied tombs. At the same time, the castle wall was used to enclose a new barn. After the French Revolution, war, storms and neglect caused the barn to crumble, and even after services resumed in the church in 1837 and a new priest came to live in the presbytery, the barn was not rebuilt. The ancient wall continued to serve as a property divider, looking onto a farmer’s field on one side and shading the presbytery’s magnolia tree and bushes of hydrangea on the other.4

  TOP: The library of the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires.

  BOTTOM: The library at Le Presbytère.

  ABOVE: The stained-glass window in Chinon depicting Christ as the life-giving vine.

  As soon as I saw the wall and the scattered stones around it, I knew that here was where I would build the room to house my books. I had in mind a distinct picture of a library, something of a cross between the long hall at Sissinghurst (Vita Sackville-West’s house in Kent, which I had recently visited) and the library of my old high school, the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. I wanted a room panelled in dark wood, with soft pools of light and comfortable chairs, and an adjacent, smaller space in which I’d set up my writing desk and reference books. I imagined shelves that began at my waist and went up only as high as the fingertips of my stretched-out arm, since, in my experience, the books condemned to heights that require ladders, or to depths that force the reader to crawl on his stomach on the floor, receive far less attention than their middle-ground fellows, no matter their subject or merit. But these ideal arrangements would have required a library three or four times the size of the vanished barn and, as Stevenson so mournfully put it, “that is the bitterness of art: you see a good effect, and some nonsense about sense continually intervenes.”5 Out of necessity, my library has shelves that begin just above the baseboards and end an octavo away from the beams of the watershed ceiling.

  The Long Hall library at Sissinghurst.

  While the library was being built, the masons discovered two windows in the old wall that had been bricked up long ago. One is a slim embrasure from which archers perhaps defended Tristan l’Hermite’s son when his angry peasants revolted; the other is a low square window protected by medieval iron bars cut roughly into stems with drooping leaves. From these windows, during the day, I can see my neighbour’s chickens hurry from one corner of the compound to another, pecking at this spot and at that, driven frantic by too many offerings, like demented scholars in a library; from the windows on the new wall opposite, I look out onto the presbytery itself and the two ancient sophora trees in my garden. But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but this space of books remains in existence. To someone standing outside, in the garden, the library at night appears like a vast vessel of some sort, like that strange Chinese villa that, in 1888, the capricious Empress Cixi caused to be built in the shape of a ship marooned in the garden lake of her Summer Palace. In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond.

  During the day, the library is a realm of order. Down and across the lettered passages I move with visible purpose, in search of a name or a voice, summoning books to my attention according to their allotted rank and file. The structure of the place is visible: a maze of straight lines, not to become lost in but for finding; a divided room that follows an apparently logical sequence of classification; a geography obedient to a predetermined table of contents and a memorable hierarchy of alphabets and numbers.

  The marble boat palace of Empress Cixi

  But at night the atmosphere changes. Sounds become muffled, thoughts grow louder. “Only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva take flight,” noted Walter Benjamin, quoting Hegel.6 Time seems closer to that moment halfway between wakefulness and sleep in which the world can be comfortably reimagined. My movements feel unwittingly furtive, my activity secret. I turn into something of a ghost. The books are now the real presence and it is I, their reader, who, through cabbalistic rituals of half-glimpsed letters, am summoned up and lured to a certain volume and a certain page. The order decreed by library catalogues is, at night, merely conventional; it holds no prestige in the shadows. Though my own library has no authoritarian catalogue, even such milder orders as alphabetical arrangement by author or division into sections by language find their power diminished. Free from quotidian constraints, unobserved in the late hours, my eyes and hands roam recklessly across the tidy rows, restoring chaos. One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries. A half-remembered line is echoed by another for reasons which, in the light of day, remain unclear. If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonably wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world’s essential, joyful muddle.

  In the first century A.D., in his book on the Roman civil war that had taken place a hundred years earlier, Lucan described Julius Caesar wandering through the ruins of Troy and remarked how every cave and every barren wood reminded his hero of the ancient Homeric stories. “A legend clings to every stone,”7 Lucan explained, describing both Caesar’s narrative-filled journey and, far in the future, the library in which I am now sitting. My books hold between their covers every story I’ve ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices. No doubt these stories exist on the page equally during the day but, perhaps because of nighttime’s acquaintance with phantom appearances and telltale dreams, they become more vividly present after the sun has set. I walk down the aisles glimpsing the works of Voltaire and hear in the dark the oriental fable of Zadig; somewhere in the distance William Beckford’s Vathek picks up the thread of the story and hands it over to Salman Rushdie’s clowns behind the blue covers of The Satanic Verses; another Orient is echoed in the magical twelfth-century village of Zahiri of Samarkand, which in turn relinquishes the telling to Naguib Mahfouz’s sorrowful survivors in present-day Egypt. Lucan’s Caesar is told to walk carefully in the Trojan landscape lest he tread on ghosts. At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.

  And yet, the library at night is not for every reader. Michel de Montaigne, for instance, disagreed with my gloomy preference. His library (he spoke of librairie, not bibliothèque, since the use of these words was just beginning to change in the vertiginous sixteenth century) was housed on the third floor of his tower, in an ancient storage space. “I spend there most of the days of my life and most of the hours of the day; I am never there at night,”8 he confessed. At night Montaigne slept, since he believed that the body suffered enough during the day for the sake of the reading mind. “Books have many pleasant qualities for those who know how to choose them, but there is no good without effort; it is not a plain and pure pleasure, not more so than others; it has its discomforts, and they are onerous; the soul disports itself, but the body, whose care I have not forgotten, remains inactive, and grows weary and sad.”9

  Not mine. The various qualities of my readings seem to permeate my every muscle, so that, when I finally decide to turn off the library light, I carry into my sleep the voices and the movements of the book I’ve just closed. I’ve learned from long experience that if I want to write on a certain subject in the morning, my reading on
that subject at night will feed my dreams not only with the arguments but with the actual events of the story. Reading about Mrs. Ramsay’s boeuf en daube makes me hungry, Petrarch’s ascension of Mount Ventoux leaves me breathless, Keats’s account of his swimming invigorates me, the last pages of Kim fill me with loving friendship, the first description of the Baskervilles’ hound makes me look uneasily over my shoulder. For Coleridge, such recollections elicit in a reader the loftiest of all possible sensations, the sense of the sublime, which, he says, “arises, not from the sight of an outward object, but from the beholder’s reflection upon it; not from the sensuous impression, but from the imaginative reflex.”10 Coleridge dismisses the “sensuous impression” too readily; in order for these nightly imaginations to flourish, I must allow my other senses to awaken—to see and touch the pages, to hear the crinkle and the rustle of the paper and the fearful crack of the spine, to smell the wood of the shelves, the musky perfume of the leather bindings, the acrid scent of my yellowing pocket books. Then I can sleep.

  Montaigne’s Tower.

  During the day, I write, browse, rearrange books, put away my new acquisitions, reshuffle sections for the sake of space. Newcomers are made welcome after a period of inspection. If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page. Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs. These evil white scabs rip off with difficulty, leaving leprous wounds and traces of slime to which adhere the dust and fluff of ages, making me wish for a special gummy hell to which the inventor of these stickers would be condemned.