Frankenstein’s monster is both the utter foreigner and the perfect world citizen; he is alien in every way, a horror to look upon, and yet made up of all manner of human pieces. Learning like a child for the first time the nature of the world and of himself, he is the archetypal lector virgo, the curious being willing to be taught by the open page, a visitor to the library of the world carrying no prejudices or experience to colour his reading. When the monster enters the blind hermit’s cottage, he pronounces these words: “Pardon the intrusion. … I am a traveller in want of a little rest.” A traveller for whom there are no borders, no nationalities, no limitations of space, because he belongs nowhere, the monster must even excuse himself for entering a world into which he has not willingly come, promoted from darkness, in the words of Milton’s Adam.348 I find the phrase “Pardon the intrusion” unbearably moving.
For Frankenstein’s monster, the world as described in books is monothematic; all volumes are from the same library. Though he travels from place to place—Switzerland, the Orkneys, Germany, Russia, England and the wilds of Tartary—he sees not the particularities but the common traits of these societies. For him, the world is almost featureless. He deals in abstracts, even though he learns details from various books of history. “I read of men concerned in public affairs governing or massacring their species. I felt the greatest ardour for virtue arise within me, and abhorrence for vice, as far as I understood the signification of these terms, relative as they were, as I applied them, to pleasure and pain alone.”349 And yet these lessons will prove fruitless. Human libraries, the monster will learn, contain for him only alien literature.
Illustration by Chevalier for the 1831 edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus.
At home in a single place and at home in the world are two notions that can both be experienced as negative. Count Dracula trusts only his private library. He prides himself on being boyar (belonging to the Russian nobility), and can scornfully list a number of nationalities he is not. Frankenstein’s monster, having no library of his own, looks for his reflection in every book he encounters, and yet never succeeds in recognizing his own story in those “foreign” pages.
And yet the possibility of a greater and deeper experience was always there for either of them. Seneca, echoing Stoic notions from four hundred years earlier, denied that the only books that should matter to us are those of our contemporaries and fellow citizens. According to Seneca, we can pick from any library whatever books we wish to call ours; each reader, he tells us, can invent his own past. He observed that the common assumption—that our parents are not of our choosing—is in fact untrue; we have the power to select our own ancestry. “Here are families with noble endowments,” he writes, pointing at his bookshelf. “Choose whichever you wish to belong to. Your adoption will give you not only the name but actually the property, and this you need not guard in a mean or niggardly spirit: the more people you share it with, the greater it will become…. This is the sole means of prolonging your mortality, rather than transforming it into immortality.” Whoever realizes this, says Seneca, “is exempt from the limitations of humanity; all ages are at his service as at the service of a god. Has time gone by? He holds it fast in recollection. Is time now present? He makes use of it. Is it still to come? He anticipates it. The amalgamation of all time into one, makes his life long.”350 For Seneca, it was not the notion of superiority that mattered (Plutarch made fun of those who considered the moon of Athens superior to the moon of Corinth351) but that of communality, the sharing among all human beings of one common reason under one divine logos. As a consequence, he widened the circle of the self to embrace not only family and friends but also enemies and slaves, as well as barbarians or foreigners, and ultimately the whole of humanity.
Centuries later, Dante was to apply this definition to himself: “As fish have water, I have the world as my home.”352 He added that though he loved his native Florence to the point of suffering exile for her cause, he could truthfully say, after reading many poets and prose writers, that the earth was full of other places more noble and more beautiful. His vigorous belief in a cosmopolitan library allowed Dante to affirm an independent national identity, yet to see the world as his patrimony and foun-tainhead. For the cosmopolitan reader a homeland is not in space, fractured by political frontiers, but in time, which has no borders. This was why Erasmus, two centuries after Dante, praised Aldus Manutius, the great Venetian printer, for providing readers with a “library without walls,” in the shape of his octavo volumes of the classics.353
The cosmopolitan library also lies at the core of Jewish culture. For the Jews, born within an oral tradition, it is paradoxically the Book—the revealed word of God—that stands at the centre of their intellectual and religious experience. For them, the Bible is itself a library, the most complete and reliable library of all, everlasting and all-encompassing, rooted in time and therefore possessed of a constant existence past, present and future. Its words carry more weight than the futile scourges of age and human change, so that even after the destruction of the Second Temple, in A.D. 70, the rabbinical scholars of the Diaspora would discuss in their distant synagogues, as instructed by the Book, the physical rules of conduct to be observed within a building that no longer had a physical being.354 To believe that the library holds a truth greater than that of the time and place in which we stand: this is the intellectual or spiritual allegiance that Seneca was arguing for. This too was the argument held by the Arab scholars of the Middle Ages, for whom libraries existed both “in time, making present the past Greek and Arab ages as exemplary cultural models, and in space, gathering what was dispersed and bringing near what was far away. … They rendered visible the invisible, and were concerned with possessing the world.”355
Jean Jacques Rousseau was of two minds about this ecumenical sentiment. In Émile he argued that the words patrie (fatherland) and citoyen (citizen) should be deleted from every modern language. But he also insisted, “Distrust those cosmopolitans who seek in the depths of their books the duties they scorn to perform at home. This kind of philosopher professes love for the Tartars, in order to be excused from loving his neighbours.”356 Sometime in the mid-seventeenth century, the poet Thomas Traherne penned what we can read today as a premature answer to Rousseau, in a manuscript that remained unpublished for two hundred and fifty years, until it was discovered by chance in a London bookstall and bought for a few pence by a curious collector. Traherne wrote, “You will never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.”357
The notion of a cosmopolitan past was with us for many centuries, perhaps until the pre-Raphaelites introduced the idea of anachronism, a barrier separating what belonged to our present from what belonged to ages gone by. For Sir Thomas Browne or for Erasmus, Plato and Aristotle were fellow debaters. Platonic and Aristotelian ideas were renewed in the minds of Montaigne and Petrarch, and the dialogue was continued throughout the generations, not on a vertical timeline but on a horizontal plane, along the same circular path to knowledge. “Whatever meant reality to our ancestors persists, and is hidden in every kind of art,” says the Emperor Augustus in Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil.358
“For as though there were a Metempsuchosis,” wrote Sir Thomas Browne in 1642, “and the soul of one man passed into another, opinions do find, after certain Revolutions, men and minds like those that first begat them. To see our selves again, we need not look for Plato’s year: every man is not only himself; there hath been many Diogenes, and as many Timons, though but few of that name: men are liv’d over again, the world is now as it was in Ages past; there was none then, but there hath been some one since that parallels him, and is, as it were, his revived self.”359 For Browne the past is made contemporary through our reading and
thinking; the past is a bookshelf open to all, an infinite source of that which then becomes ours by worthy appropriation. There are no copyright laws here, no legal boundaries, no picket fences with the sign “Private, Keep Out.” Closer to our time, the philosopher Richard Rorty drew the following conclusion from Browne’s cosmopolitan vision of history. “The best a prophet or a demiurge can hope for is to say once again what has often been said, but to say it just a little bit better.”360 The past is the cosmopolitan’s mother country, the universal fatherland, an endless library. In it (so thought Sir Thomas Browne) lies our hope for an endurable future.
At about the same time as Browne was writing these words in his Religio Medici, Gabriel Naudé, in his Advice for Setting Up a Library, was rejoicing in the riches a library could afford:
For if it is possible to enjoy in this world a certain sovereign good, a certain perfect and accomplished happiness, I believe that there is none more desirable than the dialogue and the fruitful and pleasant entertainment that a wise man might receive from such a Library, and that it is not so strange a thing to possess Books, ut illi sint coenationum ornamenta, quam ut studiorum instrumenta. Since he can rightfully call himself because of it a cosmopolitan or citizen of the whole world, he can know everything, see everything and ignore nothing; in brief, since he is absolute master of this contentment, he can use it as he pleases, take it when he wants to, converse with it as much as he likes, and without obstacles, without labours and without effort he can be instructed and know all the most precise characteristics of Everything that is, that was and that may be/ On earth, in the sea, in the uttermost hiding-places of the Heavens.361
CONCLUSION
Books are our best possessions in life, they are our immortality. I deeply regret never having possessed a library of my own.
Varlam Chalamov, My Libraries
We have always wanted to remember more, and we will continue, I believe, to weave webs to catch words in the hope that somehow, in the sheer quantity of accumulated utterances, in a book or on a screen, there will be a sound, a phrase, a spelled-out thought that will carry the weight of an answer. Every new technology has advantages over the previous one, but necessarily lacks some of its predecessor’s attributes. Familiarity, which no doubt breeds contempt, breeds also comfort; that which is unfamiliar breeds distrust. My grandmother, born in the Russian countryside at the end of the nineteenth century, was afraid of using that new invention called the telephone when it was first introduced to her neighbourhood in Buenos Aires, because, she said, it didn’t allow her to see the face of the person she was speaking to. “It makes me think of ghosts,” she explained.
Electronic text that requires no page can amicably accompany the page that requires no electricity; they need not exclude each other in an effort to serve us best. Human imagination is not monogamous nor does it need to be, and new instruments will soon sit next to the PowerBooks that now sit next to our books in the multimedia library. If the Library of Alexandria was the emblem of our ambition of omniscience, the Web is the emblem of our ambition of omnipresence; the library that contained everything has become the library that contains anything. Alexandria modestly saw itself as the centre of a circle bound by the knowable world; the Web, like the definition of God first imagined in the twelfth century,362 sees itself as a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
And yet the new sense of infinity created by the Web has not diminished the old sense of infinity inspired by the ancient libraries; it has merely lent it a sort of tangible intangibility. There may come a new technique of collecting information next to which the Web will seem to us habitual and homely in its vastness, like the aged buildings that once lodged the national libraries in Paris and Buenos Aires, Beyrouth and Salamanca, London and Seoul.
Solid libraries of wood and paper, or libraries of ghostly flickering screens, stand as proof of our resilient belief in a timeless, far-reaching order that we dimly intuit or perceive. During the Czech insurrection against the Nazis in May 1945, when Russian troops were entering Prague, the librarian Elena Sikorskaja, Vladimir Nabokov’s sister, realized that the German officers now attempting to retreat had not returned several of the books they had borrowed from the library she worked in. She and a colleague decided to reclaim the truant volumes, and set out on a rescue mission through the streets down which the Russian trucks were victoriously bundling. “We reached the house of a German pilot who returned the books quite calmly,” she wrote to her brother a few months later. “But by now they would let no one cross the main road, and everywhere there were Germans with machine guns,”363 she complained. In the midst of the confusion and chaos, it seemed important to her that the library’s pathetic attempt at order should, as far as possible, be preserved.
However appealing we may find the dream of a knowable universe made of paper and a meaningful cosmos made of words, a library, even one colossal in its proportions or ambitious and infinite in its scope, can never offer us a “real” world, in the sense in which the daily world of suffering and happiness is real. It offers us instead a negotiable image of that real world which (in the words of the French critic Jean Roudaut) “kindly allows us to conceive it,”364 as well as the possibility of experience, knowledge and memory of something intuited through a tale or guessed at through a poetic or philosophical reflection.
Saint John, in a moment of confusion, tells us not to love the world or the things that are in the world because “all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.”365 This injunction is at best a paradox. Our humble and astonishing inheritance is the world and only the world, whose existence we constantly test (and prove) by telling ourselves stories about it. The suspicion that we and the world are made in the image of something wonderfully and chaotically coherent far beyond our grasp, of which we are also part; the hope that our exploded cosmos and we, its stardust, have an ineffable meaning and method; the delight in retelling the old metaphor of the world as a book we read and in which we too are read; the conceit that what we can know of reality is an imagination made of language—all this finds its material manifestation in that self-portrait we call a library. And our love for it, and our lust to see more of it, and our pride in its accomplishments as we wander through shelves full of books that promise more and more delights, are among our happiest, most moving proofs of possessing, in spite of all the miseries and sorrows of this life, a more intimate, consolatory, perhaps redeeming faith in a method behind the madness than any jealous deity could wish upon us.
In her novel The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald says, “If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching.”366 The story of my library certainly began with finding: finding my books, finding the place in which to lodge them, finding the quiet in the space lit under the darkness outside. But if the story must end with searching, the question has to be: searching for what? Northrop Frye once observed that, had he been present at the birth of Christ, he did not think he would have heard the angels singing. “The reason why I think so is that I do not hear them now, and there is no reason to suppose that they have stopped.”367 Therefore, I am not searching for revelation of any kind, since anything said to me is necessarily limited by what I’m capable of hearing and understanding. Not for knowledge beyond what, in some secret way, I already know. Not for illumination, to which I can’t reasonably aspire. Not for experience, since ultimately I can only become aware of what is already in me. For what, then, do I search, at the end of my library’s story?
Consolation, perhaps. Perhaps consolation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Those who read, those who
tell us what they read,
Those who noisily turn
the pages of their books,
Those who have power over
red and black ink,
and over pictures,
Those are the ones who lead us, guide us,
/>
show us the way.
Aztec Codex from 1524,
Vatican Archives
While writing this book, I have contracted many debts. In the alphabetical order dear to libraries, my thanks:
To my friends and colleagues Enis Batur, Anders Björnsson, Antoine Boulad, Roberto Calasso, Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda, Viviane Flament, Dieter Hein, Chris Herschdorfer, Patricia Jaunet, Marie Korey, Richard Landon, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Hubert Nyssen, Felicidad Orquín, Lucie Pabel and Gottwalt Pankow, Dominique Papon, Fabrice Pataut, Arturo Ramoneda, Sylviane Sambord, Alberto Ruy Sánchez, Maud Stéphan-Hachem, Jean-Luc Terradillos.
To the staff of the London Library and of the Médiathèque de Poitiers, and to Anne-Catherine Sutermeister and Silvia Kimmeier of the Bibliothèque Cantonale et Universitaire de Lausanne.
To my agents, Michèle Lapautre in Paris, Guillermo Schavelzon in Barcelona, Ruth Weibel in Zurich, Bruce Westwood and Nicole Winstanley and the staff at Westwood Creative Artists in Toronto.
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