The Library at Night

by Alberto Manguel

  Ground plan of the Pergamon Library.

  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 eliminated.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 Chéri, mysteriously inscribed “To Gloriane, who attempts to ‘repair’ women and who miraculously succeeds,” in a box of “2 × 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 Meknès, Córdoba 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 months copying out one of the books kept on the library shelves.

  Reading-room in the Habott Library, Mauritania.

  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 se
rved 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. 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 Musée 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

  The Dunhuang Caves on the Great Eastern Silk Road.

  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 imaginative—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 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.

  The magnificent Diamond Sutra.

  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.