Afterlives of the Saints

by Colin Dickey

  And with signs all around him, Gregory no doubt imagined his book was chronicling the end of days, just as he had narrated their beginning. Gregory's book is not cut from the cloth of time; it is the cloth entire.

  But the odd thing about Gregory's book of history is that the end never comes. Despite an exhaustive catalog of portents, omens, and unexplained signs, Gregory's world consistently fails to come to its conclusion. After seven hundred pages, his masterpiece ends on a curiously ambiguous, if not deflated, note: "Acorns grew," he tells us, "but they never ripened."

  Even worse than T. S. Eliot's claim that the world ends with a whimper and not a bang is the truth that it doesn't end at all. No bang. No whimper. Only unripe acorns and the next day and the next.

  Gregory's surprise that the world didn't end on his watch is a feeling too many of us share. We have a hard time believing the world will survive us. We have a hard time accepting that we are living in the middle of history. As Frank Kermode points out, humans are born in medias res, and we die before the final curtain. So we make "fictive concords with origins and ends" to give meaning to our lives. It is our tendency to take the unbroken span of time and organize it around the importance of our own moment: "We thrive on epochs," in Kermode's words. But these epochs, however elaborately defined, exist only as a psychological defense against the unavoidable fact that the world does not end with our own death— a reality as offensive as it is terrifying. "We are the middle children of history," says Tyler Durden in Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, and it is the very rage over this fact that drives the men in that novel first to self-targeted brutality and then to terrorism. We crave the apocalypse because the alternative seems worse.

  It is out of a need to make epochs, to create fictive concords with origins and ends, that we write history. Writing history begins by cutting into the whole cloth that is time, choosing a beginning, narrating an arc. It's about finding a pattern, taking the raw facts of existence and making an argument from them. In history, Hayden White tells us, "reality wears the mask of a meaning, the completeness and fullness of which we can only imagine, never experience." Faced with the realization that history is unending, that it exists before us and continues after us, the historian can select only a sliver of time, designate a beginning and an end where none truly exists.

  Gregory didn't have this problem— he lived when one could still conceive of all of history at once. Perhaps his was the last generation to be able to do so, to conceive of a book that contains both the alpha and the omega. Nowadays, to believe that the end is imminent requires both self-importance and ignorance; Gregory had neither. To him, it seemed, was entrusted the entire span of history. Even though we've outlived him, his book is like nothing else, the perfect and complete record of the mortal world.

  But you and I live on the other side of this great divide, in a time now fragmented, unredeemed. When we look at the trajectory of human history, we see mostly the promises of apocalypses that never happened. Faced with all the calculations and predictions of the end in our time, perhaps it's best to remember Gregory's acorns that grew but never ripened.

  C

  There's a short Kafka fable, barely two pages long, about a strange creature who lives in an apartment hallway:

  At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colors. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle.

  You might think this a description of a pile of trash, but no, it's a creature; it's alive; it's called Odradek: "By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs."

  Odradek is harmless, devoid of malice, yet the title of Kafka's story, " Cares of a Family Man," suggests that Odradek's mere presence is somehow troubling. The family man of the story's title confesses that he is disturbed by Odradek, in part because he appears incomplete but is not:

  One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no sign of it; nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest anything of the kind; the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished.

  The real problem with Odradek is that he is useless, and because he is useless, he is also immortal:

  I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him? Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to Odradek. Am I to suppose, then, that he will always be rolling down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before the feet of my children, and my children's children? He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful.

  Sixty-seven years after Kafka's death, the artist Jeff Wall staged a photograph of a young girl descending a staircase in a run-down apartment building in Prague. Wearing a gaudy jacket of hot pink and bright yellow, she belongs firmly in the early 1990s, but huddled in the shadows of the stairs is an odd construction of wire, wood, and yarn. Titled Odradek, Tàboritskà 8, Prague, 18 July 1994, Wall's photograph shows what's lurking in the shadows of every apocalypse— the aimless, immortal Odradek. He is always with us, and that's what's so disturbing.

  We want to believe that we can understand history as Gregory understood it— perfect, unbroken, guided by purpose. But a nagging fear too often creeps in— it is the purposeless and useless trash like Odradek that will inherit the earth. The cares of the family man are also our own.

  If Gregory could believe that dust was holy enough to stave off death, then perhaps we, too, can learn to see magic in some cast-off thread and wood and metal, which seems a ruin of some great catastrophe but may in fact have its own beauty, complete in itself.

  ·two·

  The Librarian's Dream: Jerome

  Gregory of Tours may be one of the greatest writers of the saints, but he is not the one most commonly associated with the Word itself. That honor goes to the saint of editing and collecting, of libraries, of bibliographies and biblios— Hieronymous, known commonly as Jerome.

  If Gregory is God's perfect historian, Jerome is God's perfect librarian. Jerome became the patron saint of libraries and librarians because of the one task he is most known for: the translation, editing, and assemblage of what became the standard edition of the Bible for more than the first millennium— the Vulgate. Various canonical lists of the Bible had been circulating as early as the mid– third century, but only with the Council of Rome in 382 did an official council of bishops agree on the list of books to be included. Known as the Damasine List, it was named for Pope Damasus I, who headed the council and had hired Jerome as his personal secretary. And so it fell to Jerome, also present at the council, to assemble a fresh translation of this newly ratified library— known first as the versio vulgata, or commonly used translation, and later simply as the Vulgate.

  For all the controversy surrounding the Bible, its apocrypha and conflicting versions, Jerome's accomplishment was seen in terms of divine intervention— as the Council of Rome had been guided by the hand of God, so Jerome must have been. Seen in this light, the Bible is perfect: There are no books missing, no books extraneous. It is a perfect library, a collection of exactly the books that God intended for humankind.

  Every librarian since, one way or another, has been forced to measure her-or himself against this librarian saint. Anyone seeking to build the perfect collection must reckon at some point with the divine certainty of Jerome. And if you cannot be sure, as Jerome was, exactly what belongs in your library, then the only alternative is to include it all, leave nothing out. It was this caution that motivated Ptolemy I to
build the Library of Alexandria at the end of the third century B.C.E., in which he hoped to assemble "all the books of all the people of the world." Ptolemy calculated all the books in the world to be roughly five hundred thousand volumes; this seemingly large number would now represent just a fraction of the total books in existence. Long ago, our capacity for books overtook any sane number: The complete library is now, quite simply, infinite. If you do not have the divine grace of Jerome to tell you which books to keep and which to exclude, you are obligated to take in everything, and you are condemned to a library without end.

  This is the library imagined by Jorge Luis Borges in his short story "The Library of Babel." He describes the library as an "indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries."

  In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below— one after another, endlessly. The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon's six sides; the height of the bookshelves, floor to ceiling, is hardly greater than the height of a normal librarian. One of the hexagon's free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn opens onto another gallery, identical to the first— identical, in fact, to all. To the left and right of the vestibule are two tiny compartments. One is for sleeping, upright; the other, for satisfying one's physical necessities. Through this space, too, there passes a spiral staircase, which winds upward and downward into the remotest distance.

  Every librarian, every book collector, finds him-or herself between these two mythical places— the Perfect Finite Library of God and the Infinite Library of Babel, the one transcribed by Jerome, the other by Borges.

  But in some ways, they are closer to one another than they first appear. Borges's description of the infinite library as a series of hexagonal cells that disappear into the distance echoes (perhaps coincidentally) the Roman catacombs that Jerome would visit while he was a young scholar, with bodies instead of books. "Often," he writes, "I would find myself entering those crypts, deep dug in the earth, with their walls on either side lined with the bodies of the dead. . . . Here and there," he continues, "the light, not entering in through windows, but filtering down from above through shafts, relieved the horror of the darkness. But again, as soon as you found yourself cautiously moving forward, the black night closed around and there came to my mind the line of Virgil, 'the horror and the silences terrified their souls.' "

  It was to mortify his own soul that Jerome came down to those catacombs so that he could remind himself of his own mortality. This reminder of death— in Latin memento mori, "remember that you will die"—is represented in art by a human skull, the grinning death's head we all will leave behind. This skull is a common image in representations of Jerome, the saint who transcribes the immortal Word even as his mortal body fails him.

  The most compelling of these images of Jerome are those by the Italian Renaissance painter Caravaggio. In one painting, he depicts the librarian's long, thin arm stretched out over a great folio, and on that folio — as a compositional counterpoint to Je rome's haloed head— rests a human skull, reminding him of what awaits, exhorting him to prepare for the next life.

  F I G U R E 2 : Saint Jerome Writing (c. 1604), Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio GALLERIA BORGHESE, ROME, ITALY/ THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

  In Jerome's time, this preparation took the form of asceticism, a word deriving from the Greek askesis, which means "exercise" or "athletic training." In practice, asceticism was abstinence from worldly pleasures and all but the most basic needs— the deprivation of one's physical needs seen as crucial preparation for the time when one was without body, when one was pure spirit. Caravaggio's painting of Jerome is striking because he so forcefully emphasizes the decrepit, ailing body of the great librarian. Jerome is more skeletal than flesh, his arm stretched across the folio like a body pulled across the rack, as though the immortal Word were itself some kind of torture device.

  Caravaggio reminds us that Jerome was not only a librarian; he was also flesh, mortal. There's a subversive element to Caravaggio's painting, precisely because what's most engaging about the work is Jerome's hated mortal coil, that which he cannot escape. Jerome began devoting himself to asceticism when he was about thirty years old, having left Rome for Antioch after a serious illness led him to abandon his remaining secular studies. He ventured into the deserts of Syria, where a converted Jew taught him Hebrew and he began translations of the Hebrew Scriptures. Eventually he returned to civilization and allowed himself to be ordained as a bishop, but only under the condition that he be allowed to maintain his ascetic life. Immersed in his books and his translations, Jerome prepared his body for death and prepared his mind for a life without his corruptible body.

  Returning to Rome, Jerome was distinctly out of place— a desert hermit amid a bustling metropolis. He harangued the city's clergymen for their posh lifestyle, making himself more than a few enemies. But eventually a circle of wealthy women, including the widow Paula and her daughter Blaesilla, gravitated to him, following his example and adopting an ascetic lifestyle.

  Here in Rome, under the direction of Damasus, the master librarian continued work on his perfect library, where his reading itself was a sort of asceticism. As Michel de Montaigne noted 1,400 years later, reading "is not a plain and pure pleasure . . . it has its disagreements, and they are onerous; the soul disports itself, but the body, whose care I have not forgotten, remains inactive, it grows weary and sad." In the very act of reading and study, Jerome could be said to be forever mortifying his body.

  As I read my way through these accounts of his life, I found myself wondering if the very act of reading, or at least book collecting, was itself a kind of memento mori, and whether this is the reason so many scholars over the centuries have included human skulls in their libraries, perched amid their books on endless shelves. Like Jerome, Borges's unnamed librarian remains fixated on his own death. "I am preparing to die, a few leagues from the hexagon where I was born," he tells us early on. "When I am dead, compassionate hands will throw me over the railing; my tomb will be the unfathomable air, my body will sink for ages, and will decay and dissolve in the wind engendered by my fall, which shall be infinite."

  That image is both beautiful and haunting, but I wonder: In the Library of Babel, do bones, too, decay? Borges's description suggests that they do, that at some point during the infinite fall even the librarian's bones disintegrate. But for a fall to be infinite, there must be something that is always falling, and I prefer to think that the bones remain, and that they fall infinitely, endlessly, through the hexagonal galleries, so that as the librarians go about their business in the Library of Babel, every so often comes the sound of bones from some librarian who died many, many floors up. The shafts of this great library filled with the sporadic clattering of bones, a memento mori falling at terminal velocity.

  The stubborn reality of the body over the immortal Word was a truth that the widow Paula and her daughter Blaesilla were to learn all too well. After a few months following Jerome's ascetic lifestyle, Blaesilla, who had recently recovered from a serious illness, collapsed from exhaustion and malnutrition and died shortly thereafter. Paula was grief-stricken, but Jerome found her display of earthly emotion both unbecoming and unchristian. The master librarian chastised Paula for her grief at the loss of her daughter's earthly body: "I pardon you the tears of a mother, but I ask you to restrain your grief," he wrote to her. "When I think of the parent I cannot blame you for weeping: but when I think of the Christian and the recluse, the mother disappears from my view." Ultimately Jerome was forced out of Rome, in part because his protector, Damasus, died but also because of his indirect role in the death of Blaesilla and his cold indifference to her fate.

  Before I read this story, I had always assumed, or wanted to believe, that the narrator in Borges's fable was a version of Jerome and that we were listening to the voice of the great
librarian himself. But I'm less sure now. Late in the story, the narrator describes a librarian greater than himself whom he calls the Book-Man, the librarian who understands the entirety of the Library of Babel, the sole librarian who has read the ultimate book. "On some shelf in some hexagon," he says, "there must exist a book that is the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books, and some librarian must have examined that book." The Book-Man is thus clearly analogous to a god, but I would argue that Jerome is a better fit— after all, it is not God whom librarians dream of but Jerome. And if this longing for the perfect library sometimes takes the form of idolatry, so be it. Borges's narrator tells us that "there are still vestiges of the sect that worshipped that distant librarian. Many have gone in search of Him. For a hundred years, men beat every possible path— and every path in vain." And finally, Borges's narrator confesses that he, too, has long searched for the Book-Man:

  It is in ventures such as these that I have squandered and spent my years. I cannot think it unlikely that there is such a total book on some shelf in the universe. I pray to the unknown gods that some man— even a single man, tens of centuries ago — has perused and read that book. If the honor and wisdom and joy of such a reading are not to be my own, then let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my own place be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.