A Reader on Reading

I said that libraries carry in their essence the ambition of Babel to conquer space and of Alexandria to outlive time. I said that they are our collective memory, divided into the myriad memories of generations and generations of individual readers. I want to add that, as if the knowledge were embedded in their genes, libraries understand that the walls that surround them are mere scaffolding and that their place is the wide, open world of those readers who, in desert plains, first recorded their experience and imagination on hand-held clay tablets. Because of the power that reading grants us, to see with the eyes of others and speak with the tongues of the dead, because of the possibilities of enlightenment and of witnessing and of wisdom that libraries hold, our fears invented for us, as readers, the image of the ivory tower, of the Sleeping Beauty castle that keeps us bound by pretty words, far away from the world of reality. The contrary, of course, is true. Don Quixote’s reading may make him see windmills as giants and sheep as enemy soldiers, but these, as he himself secretly guesses, are only imaginary constructs, metaphors to better recognize the true suffering of flesh and blood, and the imperative to be just in an unjust world. Madame Bovary finds in books the ideal romances that she will never find in life, but that lying perfection lends her the strength to refuse un-happiness and subservience as her lifelong lot. Children know that Little Red Riding Hood isn’t real and that wolves don’t habitually haunt the woods, but the frightening story confirms an ineffable knowledge that childhood is a dangerous place where dark things roam and nothing is as it seems. Books force us to look upon the world.

But whether we wander to lose or to find ourselves, in libraries and on roads, depends on our own will, not on the hostile or welcoming cities that lie behind and before us. We can allow ourselves to be anchored in a shallow page, never moving forward or, like the Wandering Jew, steer forward with the flow, on and on, towards the enlarging horizon. “For my part,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, one of the most charitable of men, “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

The Library as Home

She contented herself with turning round, looking at the shelves

as she came to them … but the oddest part of it all was that,

whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what

it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite empty, though

the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold.

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 5

FOR THE PAST SEVEN YEARS, I have lived in an old stone presbytery in France, south of the Loire Valley, in a village of fewer than ten houses. I chose the place because next to the house itself was a barn, partly torn down centuries ago, large enough to accommodate my library of some thirty thousand books, assembled over six itinerant decades. I knew that once the books found their place, I would find mine.

My library is not a single beast but a composite of many others, a fantastic animal made up of the several libraries built and then abandoned, over and over again, throughout my life. I can’t remember a time in which I did not have a library of some sort. The present library is a sort of multilayered autobiography, each book holding the moment in which I read it for the first time. The scribbles on the margins, the occasional date on the flyleaf, the faded bus ticket marking a page for a reason today mysterious all try to remind me of who I was then. For the most part, they fail. My memory is less interested in me than in my books, and I find it easier to remember the story read once than the young man who then read it.

One of my earliest memories (I must have been two or three at the time) is of a shelfful of books on the wall above my cot from which my nurse would choose a bedtime story. This was my first library; when I learned to read by myself a year or so later, the shelf, transferred now to safe ground level, be came my private domain. I remember arranging and rearranging my books according to secret rules that I invented for myself: all the Golden Books series had to be grouped together, the fat collections of fairy tales were not allowed to touch the minuscule Beatrix Potters, stuffed animals were not permitted to sit on the same shelf as the books. I told myself that if these rules were upset, terrible things would happen. Superstition and the art of libraries are tightly entwined.