by Anita Anand
It was a low, red-brick box on grass that verged on wasteland, and I would be there twice a day – rocking up with all the ardour of a clubber turning up to a rave. I read every book in there – not really, of course, but as good as; when I’d read all the funny books, I moved on to the sexy ones, then the dreamy ones, the mad ones, the ones that described distant mountains, idiots, plagues, experiments.
I sat at the big table and read all the papers; on a council estate in Wolverhampton, the broadsheets were as incongruous and illuminating as an Eames lamp.
The shelves were supposed to be loaded with books – but they were, of course, really doors; each book-lid opened was as exciting as Alice putting her gold key in the door. I spent days running in and out of other worlds like a time bandit or a spy. I was as excited as I’ve ever been in my life in that library, scoring new books the minute they came in; ordering books I’d heard of, then waiting, fevered, for them to arrive, like they were Word Christmas.
I had to wait nearly a year for Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire to come; even so, I was still too young to think it anything but a bit wanky, and abandoned it twenty pages in for Jilly Cooper.
But Les Fleurs du Mal, man! In a building overlooked by a Kwik Save, where the fags and alcohol were kept in a locked metal cage lest they be stolen! Simply knowing that I could have it in my hand was a comfort in this place so very, very far from anything extraordinary or exultant.
Everything I am is based on this ugly building on its lonely lawn – lit up during winter darkness, open in the slashing rain – which allowed a girl so poor she didn’t even own a purse to come in twice a day and experience actual magic: travelling through time, making contact with the dead (Dorothy Parker, Charlotte Brontë, Richard Brautigan, Truman Capote).
A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen instead. A human with a brain and a heart and a desire to be uplifted, rather than a customer with a credit card and an inchoate ‘need’ for ‘stuff’.
A mall – the shops – are places where your money makes the wealthier wealthy. But a library is where the wealthy’s taxes pay for you to become a little more extraordinary instead. A satisfying reversal. A balancing of the power.
After protests, injunctions have been granted to postpone library closures, followed by full judicial reviews of councils over their closure plans. As the cuts kick in, protesters and lawyers are fighting for individual libraries like dog-walkers pushing stranded whales back into the sea.
A public library is such a potent symbol of a town’s values; each one closed down might as well be 6,000 stickers plastered over every available surface reading: ‘WE CHOOSE TO BECOME MORE STUPID AND DULL’.
Although I have read a million words on the necessity for the cuts, I have not seen a single letter on what the exit plan is: what happens in four years’ time, when the cuts will have succeeded, and the economy gets back to ‘normal’ again. Do we then – prosperous once more – go round and re-open all these centres, clinics and libraries, which have sat, dark and unused, for nearly half a decade?
It’s hard to see how – it costs millions of pounds to re-open deserted buildings, and cash-strapped councils will have looked at billions of square feet of prime real estate with a coldly realistic eye.
Unless the government has developed an exit strategy for the cuts, and has insisted that councils not sell closed properties, by the time we get back to ‘normal’ again, our Victorian and postwar and ’60s red-brick boxy libraries will be coffee shops, Lidls and pubs. No new libraries will be built to replace them. These libraries will be lost forever.
And in their place, we will have a thousand more public spaces where you are simply the money in your pocket rather than the hunger in your heart. Kids – poor kids – will never know the fabulous, benign quirk of self-esteem of walking into ‘their’ library and thinking: ‘I have read 60 per cent of the books in here. I am awesome.’ Libraries that stayed open during the Blitz will be closed by budgets.
A trillion small doors closing.
THE LIBRARY OF BABYLON
TOM HOLLAND
In one of his most celebrated fictions, Jorge Luis Borges imagined an entire universe that was a library. Hexagons lined with books extend forever, ‘one after another, endlessly’. Contained within the infinitude of these hexagons is every book that has ever existed. Before the chilling eternity of the library’s vastness, it is not the books themselves but humanity that is menaced by ruin. ‘I am perhaps misled by old age and fear’, the anonymous narrator confesses, ‘but I suspect that the human species – the only species – teeters at the verge of extinction, yet that the Library – enlightened, solitary, infinite, perfectly unmoving, armed with precious volumes, pointless, incorruptible, and secret – will endure.’
Even by the incomparable standards of Borges, the fantasy is a dazzling one. Role reversal is invariably unsettling. The truth is, of course, that the library has never existed that was not shadowed by an apprehension of its own mortality. Borges himself knew this better than anyone. His fiction is haunted by the vanished libraries, and the vanished books, of our own world, in which ‘the gnostic gospel of Basilides’ and ‘the lost books of Tacitus’ do not sit waiting to be discovered on the shelf of some hexagon, but instead have been destroyed forever. To look at a library is to know that its volumes can be burned, its shelves cleared and emptied, its walls left an empty shell. It is to feel – even in this age of digital abundance – a sense of the precariousness and the preciousness of human knowledge.
Borges titles his fiction ‘The Library of Babel’. It alludes to the great city in the first book of the Bible, whose inhabitants sought to build a tower that would reach to the heavens, and were punished by God with a multiplicity of languages, so that they were left unable to ‘understand one another’s speech’. Yet although the Bible itself attributes the name of Babel to an echoing of the Hebrew verb ‘balal’ – ‘to confuse’ or ‘mix’ – it also has another source. Babel is Babylon, and the great tower commemorated in the Bible is the vast ziggurat, formed out of seventeen million bricks and looming almost a hundred metres high, that once dominated the giant city. Time would see both ‘become a heap of ruins, the haunt of jackals, a horror and a hissing, without inhabitant’ – and yet the glamour and mystique of Babylon’s name would long outlive its ruin. If the city was commemorated by Jews and Christians as the very archetype of worldly greatness brought low, then so also was it remembered by them as something rather different: the great repository of humankind’s primordial wisdom.
A whole millenium after Babylon had lost her independence for good, and five hundred years after the birth of Christ, it was still recalled that the mudflats stretching between the two great rivers of the Tigris and the Euphrates – ‘Mesopotamia’, as it was known in Greek – had provided humanity with the original wellspring of its learning. By AD 500, libraries filled with the wisdom of Jewish and Christian scholars dotted the landscape, and the idols of Babylon had long since been toppled and destroyed. What had not vanished, though, was a sense of awe at the sheer antiquity and scale of the learning once commanded by the Babylonian priests. A story was told of how workmen digging amid the Mesopotamian mud had once stumbled across a whole buried library. The books, when they were deciphered, had been found to contain the wisdom of the generations who had lived before Noah’s Flood. Clearly, then, a land where such treasures still existed, waiting to be excavated, richly merited its reputation as the land ‘where the true art of divination first made its appearance’.
Modern archaeology has confirmed the gist, if not the details, of this legend. Mesopotamia was indeed, just as the ancients always held it to be, the birthplace of the library. The oldest known example of one, excavated at the site of Nippur, in
what is now southern Iraq, was already centuries old when Babylon first rose to greatness. Dating from the middle of the third millennium BC, it contained gazetteers, lists of gods, collections of hymns, and works of literature. The scribes who maintained the collection seem even to have issued a catalogue. Yet if its survival serves to demonstrate just how primordial is the desire of humans to assemble and systematise the sources of their knowledge, then so also does it bear witness to something far bleaker. The texts contained within the library of Nippur consisted of inscriptions pricked originally on wet clay – and the resulting tablets only lasted into the present because, at some point in their history, they were baked rock hard. An unknown conqueror, laying Nippur to waste, must have torched the building in which the tablets were being stored – and by burning it to the ground, preserved its contents for good. Right from the very beginning, then, it seems, libraries have embodied a certain paradox: that conservation and ruin can be sides of the same coin.
The warlords of ancient Mesopotamia, who never wasted any opportunity to illumine their own names, and to ride their chariots over the rubble of others’ ambitions, certainly understood this. Tiglath-Pileser I, the Assyrian king who at the end of the second millennium BC set his city on such an intimidating and impregnable footing that for almost five hundred years it would be the most feared power in the Near East, was also the first man known by name to have founded a library. The association between pitiless wars of conquest and bibliophilia was clearly an enduring one in Assyria: the library founded by its last great king, Ashurbanipal, was on a scale that dwarfed anything that had gone before it. Collections of clay tablets, no less than slaves or gold, were highly prized by the Assyrians, who had only to capture an enemy city to start carting off its libraries. To the book-loving Ashurbanipal, rare texts ranked as the very pickings of conquest. All of them were duly branded with his stamp. ‘Palace of Ashurbanipal’, they read, ‘King of Assyria, King of the World’.
But his vaunt would prove an empty one. In 612 BC, fifteen years after the death of Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian capital of Nineveh was sacked. The great royal library was put to the torch, and its collection of clay tablets – boastful stamps of ownership and all – baked solid by licking flames. Back in 648, Ashurbanipal had captured Babylon, and looted some 2,000 tablets; now, with the destruction of Nineveh, the Babylonians had their revenge. Over the ruins of the Assyrian Empire, they raised a dominion of their own. In the best traditions of Mesopotamian imperialism, they sacked cities, deported entire peoples – and lovingly built up libraries. Scholars pored over vast collections, borrowed tablets, even stole them. Some busied themselves with deciphering ancient inscriptions, recycling archaic phrases, looking to the distant past to legitimise the needs and whims of their masters. Others traced the turning of the ages of the world, scrupulously recording lists of kings, and compiling detailed star charts. Throughout Mesopotamia, a great network of observatories had been established, enabling astrologers to trace the warnings of the heavens, and speedily to dispatch news of them back to the intelligence chiefs in Babylon. This information was all of it stored in libraries. The ability to read the future and to map the patterns cast on statecraft by the stars had always been a potent weapon of the Babylonian kings. The instincts that made Babylon the capital of libraries were much the same, in the final reckoning, as those that had brought her victory over the Assyrians. Knowledge was power – and power was barely worth having without knowledge.
Even after Babylon had fallen in her turn – first, in 539, to the Persians, and then again, in 331, to Alexander the Great – the primordial Mesopotamian notion that libraries were markers of class did not fade. In time, indeed, it came to affect the entire interpretation of what had been, for two long centuries, an ongoing series of wars between the Greeks and the Persians, and which had only finally been brought to an end when Alexander finished off the Persian Empire for good. According to Aulus Gellius, an engaging Roman miscellanist, libraries had been directly in the front line of this conflict. The Persian king, not content with burning Athens, had made off with her public library; one of Alexander’s generals, a century and a half later, had then made a point of sending it back. Alexander himself, it was confidently claimed, had planned to build the largest library ever seen directly on the site of Nineveh. Seleucus, a notoriously high-aiming general who managed to elbow his way to the throne of Babylon after the death of Alexander, was reputed to have taken this strain of megalomania even further. A century or so after his death, he was remembered with mingled horror and admiration as a man who had sought ‘to burn all the books in the world, because he wanted the calculation of time to begin with himself’.
Tall stories one and all. The truth was that the Greeks – whose cities were a fraction of the size of Babylon, whose societies boasted no distinct scribal class, and whose economies had always managed perfectly well without state bureaucracies – had no tradition of libraries. It was only with Alexander’s conquest of the fabulously ancient and sophisticated cities of Mesopotamia that their eyes were opened to what they had been missing. To the tough and brutal men who had served with Alexander as his lieutenants, and who then, on their master’s death, carved up his massive kingdom among themselves, the possession of a library was an obvious way to signal their self-promotion from the ranks of condottieri to kings. The fantasies bred by the ambitions of these warlords served to demonstrate just how effectively libraries could stand proxy for freshly minted empires. Just as every king, in the wake of Alexander, dreamed of ruling the entire world, so their libraries were designed to serve them as the focus of a truly olympian conceit: that every book ever written could be gathered in a single place.
The story told of Seleucus, that he had aimed at a universal bonfire of libraries, found its mirror image in the founding by another of Alexander’s generals of what remains, to this day, the world’s most celebrated library. Ptolemy, a battle-hardened veteran who combined the instincts of a street-fighter with the tastes of a littérateur, had grabbed for himself the only kingdom that could rival Mesopotamia for sheer wealth and antiquity: Egypt. Indeed, in one obvious way, the land of the Nile was even better suited to the manufacture of books than the mudflats that surrounded Babylon. The ready availability of papyrus, a reed which grows in the marshes of the Delta, and can be flattened out to make a highly durable writing material, had enabled pen-pushers to inspect, measure and prescribe the lives of the Egyptians for millenia. Now, with the arrival in Egypt of a foreign and upstart dynasty eager to make a splash, papyrus came into its own. Settling in Alexandria, the great city founded on the Mediterranean shoreline by Alexander himself, Ptolemy and his heirs set about transforming their parvenu capital into the most formidable cultural power-house on the face of the planet. A great temple, filled with gardens, porticos and lodgings, was built right in the heart of the city, and dedicated to the Muses: a ‘Museum’. Here, a resident community of scholars were to enjoy a royally-sponsored life of the mind, complete with ‘free meals, large salaries, tax-exemptions, beautiful surroundings, good lodgings, and plenty of slaves’. Most crucially of all, they were to be provided with that lifeblood of scholarship: an immense collection of books. The Library, at its height, would contain a quite staggering number of scrolls – upwards of a million, by some estimates. Nothing quite like it had ever been seen before.
Yet the fame of the Library of Alexandria exists in the context of a familiar paradox. Rather as it was the incineration of clay tablets in Mesopotamia that ensured their ultimate survival, so has the celebrity of Ptolemy’s great foundation long depended for its fantastical character upon the fact that it no longer exists. Nothing sheds a more glamorous light upon the legendary scale of the Library’s holdings than the mystery of their destruction. Many culprits have been suggested. One theory holds that Julius Caesar accidentally incinerated the Library while he and Cleopatra were under siege in Alexandria – but although he is certainly recorded as having burnt a great quantity of books, these
appear to have been scrolls stored in a warehouse beside the docks, rather than the holdings of the Library itself. Another legend, even more popular, claims that the classical world’s greatest monument to learning was sacrificed upon the altar of religious savagery and ignorance. Edward Gibbon, in his great history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, fingered ‘the mischievous bigotry of the Christians who studied to destroy the monuments of idolatry’. A Christian bishop, writing in the thirteenth century, had in turn pinned the blame on the Muslims. The Arab conqueror of Alexandria, after he had enquired of the Caliph what should be done with the contents of the great library, is said to have ordered them to be burnt. ‘If their content is in accordance with the book of Allah, we may do without them, for in that case the book of Allah more than suffices. If, on the other hand, they contain matter not in accordance with the book of Allah, there can be no need to preserve them.’ Into the flames the books of the Library duly went – and for six months, it is said, they kept the public baths well stoked. Both stories, however, are implausible in the extreme. The anecdote told of the Caliph has all the verisimilitude of a fable from the Arabian Nights, while Gibbon, in laying the blame for the vandalism upon an archbishop ‘whose hands were alternately polluted with gold, and with blood’, allowed his love of a solemn sneer at Christianity to trump his customary close attention to the sources. The mystery, then, abides. All we can really know for certain is that the Library and its precious contents did indeed vanish long ago. To call this a mystery, though, is perhaps to over-dignify it. ‘I sincerely regret the more valuable libraries which have been involved in the ruin of the Roman empire’, wrote Gibbon; ‘but when I seriously compute the lapse of ages, the waste of ignorance, and the calamities of war, our treasures, rather than our losses, are the object of my surprise.’ Alexandria may have boasted the most famous library in the world; but she was not the only city to have lost a great collection. In AD 267, a band of Germanic freebooters called the Heruli sacked Athens, and destroyed a library that had been founded by the Emperor Hadrian, no less. A hundred years later, and a noted scholar could lament that the libraries of Rome were as empty ‘as tombs’. Even in Constantinople, the city that endured as a capital of a Roman Empire for almost a millenium after the extinction of the Empire in the West, only fragments of the libraries that had once adorned the palaces of the emperor and the patriarch survived their decrepitude. Deep in the countryside beyond Constantinople, an Arab ambassador reported in the tenth century, there stood a temple where the ancient pagans were said to have worshipped the stars, piled so high with manuscripts that it would have taken a thousand camels to carry them away – and all the maunscripts were crumbling into dust.