The Library at Night

by Alberto Manguel

  At the end of the fifteenth century, to exercise his memory among the books he knew best, Niccolò 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

  THE LIBRARY

  AS MIND

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

  Aby Warburg, Ausgewählte 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 This arbitrary division, which grants certain books a glowing presence and relegates others to the shadows, is superseded by another order, which owes its existence merely to what I can remember.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 Cécile 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 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.

  The Last Judgement fresco at Sainte Cecile Cathedral in Albi.

  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 Páramo 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.

  Aby Warburg reading.

  One day in 1920, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, 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 collectio
n 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

  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 misères 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 ut pictura 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 symbology 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 Kompatibilität, 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.