Packing My Library by Alberto Manguel

Author:Alberto Manguel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2018-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

THIS SENSE OF LIVING WITHIN THE MODEL OF THAT which we attempt to reproduce in words and images is everywhere present, taunting us, daring us to try. For example, my boxed-up books have conjured up doppelgängers in the places in which I now live. On Broadway, between 72nd and 74th Streets sidewalk vendors display piles of books on trestle tables. I stop every time I go by and glance through the paperback spines and the mostly tattered hardbacks. Often I come across titles I recognize, sometimes in the same edition I collected in my library or had in my distant adolescence (but no longer have), ghostly reminders of another place and another time. I pick up the book, I leaf through it, I read a line here and there. Is this really the same book I held in my hands faraway and long ago? Is this copy identical to the one in which I read for the first time Hesse’s story of Prince Siddhartha or Margaret Mead’s chronicle of adolescents in Samoa? The legend of the double says that one can recognize the other because the imposter casts no shadow. Here too, the doppelgänger of the book I held in my hands is shadowless, something without a past. Each reading experience is unique to its place and time, and cannot be duplicated. In spite of my hopes, I know that no library can be fully resurrected.

One of the most common of literary commonplaces is that the number of plots imaginable is vast but limited. Might this be true of libraries as well? The number of combinations of books, though unthinkably great, is not infinite. Lewis Carroll, over a century and a half ago, summed up this dizzying notion in Sylvie and Bruno. “The day must come,” he wrote, “when every possible book will be written. For the number of words is finite.” And he added, “Instead of saying ‘what book shall I write?’ an author will ask himself ‘which book shall I write?’” We seem condemned to repetition.

But is this repetition due to the feeble capabilities of the human mind or to our associative perceptions as readers? “Since life is a voyage or a battle,” remarked Raymond Queneau, “every story is either the Iliad or the Odyssey.” Are we incapable of conceiving of an entirely new story or do we recognize in every story traces of our previous readings? Does the fact that Adventures of Pinocchio seems to me like a rewriting of Adventures of Telemachus (both tell the story of a boy in search of his father) and every new trashy novel like every old trashy novel depend on the scarcity of provisions in our mental pantry or on our ability to recognize the Jamesian figures in our carpets?

I suspect that there is a third possibility. We like repetition. As children we ask that the same story be read to us in exactly the same manner, again and again. As adults, though we declare a passion for novelty, we

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