The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel

Author:Alberto Manguel [Manguel, Alberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-307-37027-3
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2006-06-05T16:00:00+00:00

THE LIBRARY

AS MIND

… to give visible form to the psychic presence and to the movements of the soul.

Aby Warburg, Ausgewählte Schriften

Like Machiavelli, I often sit among my books at night. While I prefer to write in the morning, at night I enjoy reading in the thick silence, when triangles of light from the reading lamps split my library shelves in two. Above, the high rows of books vanish into darkness; below sits the privileged section of the illuminated titles. This arbitrary division, which grants certain books a glowing presence and relegates others to the shadows, is superseded by another order, which owes its existence merely to what I can remember. My library has no catalogue; having placed the books on the shelves myself, I generally know their position by recalling the library’s layout, and areas of light or darkness make little difference to my exploring. The remembered order follows a pattern in my mind, the shape and division of the library, rather as a stargazer connects in narrative patterns the pinpoints of the stars; but the library in turn reflects the configuration of my mind, its distant astrologer. The deliberate yet random order of the shelves, the choice of subject matters, the intimate history of each book’s survival, the traces of certain times and certain places left between the pages, all point to a particular reader. A keen observer might be able to tell who I am from a tattered copy of the poems of Blas de Otero, the number of volumes by Robert Louis Stevenson, the large section devoted to detective stories, the minuscule section devoted to literary theory, the fact that there is much Plato and very little Aristotle on my shelves. Every library is autobiographical.

In the Cathedral of Sainte Cécile of Albi, in the south of France, a late-fifteenth-century fresco depicts a scene from the Last Judgment. Under an unfurled scroll, the recalled souls march towards their fate, each naked and solemnly carrying on the breast an open book. In this troop of resurrected readers, the Book of Life has been divided and reissued as a series of individual volumes, open,207 as the Apocalypse has it, so that the dead may be “judged out of those things which were written in the books.”208 The idea persists even today: our books will bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we are and who we have been, our books hold the share of pages granted to us from the Book of Life. By the books we call ours we will be judged.

What makes a library a reflection of its owner is not merely the choice of the titles themselves, but the mesh of associations implied in the choice. Our experience builds on experience, our memory on other memories. Our books build on other books that change or enrich them, that grant them a chronology apart from that of literary dictionaries. I’m now, after all this time, incapable of tracing all these connections myself. I forget, or don’t even know, in what way many of these books relate to one another.

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