The Library at Night

by Alberto Manguel

  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 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.

  Portrait of Jacob Edelstein.

  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 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:

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

  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

  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 incli
nation.” 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 academia 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:

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

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

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

  IV. 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…. 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.

  The Afghan bookseller Shah Muhammad Rais in Kabul.

  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 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

  BELOW: Portrait of Booker T. Washington.

  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 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

  A postcard showing the Cossitt Library in Memphis.

  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 émigré 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 li
brary 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 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