The Library at Night

by Alberto Manguel

  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 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.

  One of Warburg’s “Mnemosyne”panels.

  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 rea
der 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.

  THE LIBRARY

  AS ISLAND

  An old man is always a Crusoe.

  François Mauriac, Nouveaux mémoires intérieurs

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

  Robinson Crusoe and Friday.

  We might be tempted to guess what these “several Portuguese books” were. Probably a copy of Camões’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 Fernão 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.

  He does tell us, however, of his uses of the Bible. It colours each of his actions, it dictates the meaning of his sufferings, 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.