“When we look into a mirror,” wrote Harold Pinter in his Nobel Prize lecture, “we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror—for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us. I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory. If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us — the dignity of man.”
At the Mad Hatter’s table sit today not the imaginary creatures met by Alice but painfully real beings: the inheritors of Cortés, reducing all creation to sticks and stones; the merchants for whom the only measure of value is that of financial profit and who believe that the surest way to bigger earnings is the lowering of the public’s intellectual level; the catechists, for whom art is not a dialogue and an exchange of questions but a series of simpleminded and stifling answers; the rag-and-bone vendors who can turn anything into a salable commodity; the philosophers who, in the name of personal considerations or abstract notions of justice, lend arguments to those in power, and false justification; the egotists who, under the protection of civic freedom, believe that tolerance is a virtue that allows for the distinction between “those above” and “those below;” the advertisers of trite virtues and creators of false needs; the religious leaders who believe that the deity has granted their church, and no other, grace, illumination, and a privileged position above that of all other creeds; the revolutionaries for whom there can be no purification without destruction; the political leaders for whom wealth and power are proof of righteousness and moral authority. In a word, the enemies of “the dignity of man.”
Alice and her Wonderland shadows play out for us the parts we enact in the real world. Their folly is tragic or amusing, they are themselves exemplary fools or they are eloquent witnesses to the folly of their shadowy brethren, they tell us stories of absurd or mad behavior which mirrors our own so that we may better see and understand it. The difference is that their folly, unlike ours, is framed by the margins of the page, contained by the however-uncertain imagination of their author. Crimes and evil deeds in the real world have sources so deep and consequences so distant that we can never hold them entirely in our understanding, we can merely clip them in a moment, box them in a judicial file, or observe them under the lens of psychoanalysis. Our deeds, unlike those of the great mad creatures of literature, seep far and wide into the world, infecting everything and every place beyond all help and purpose.
The folly of the world is unintelligible. We can (and do, of course) experience it, suffer it in the flesh and in the mind, fall under its merciless weight and be crushed by its implacable movement towards the precipice. We can even, in certain enlightened moments, rise through it to acts of extraordinary humanity, irrationally wise and insanely daring. For such acts, no words suffice. And yet, through language at its best, our folly can be trapped in its own doings, made to repeat itself, made to enact its cruelties and catastrophes (and even its glorious deeds) but this time under lucid observation and with protected emotion, beneath the aseptic covering of words, lit by the reading lamp set over the open book.
The flesh-and-blood beings at the Mad Hatter’s table — the military leaders, the torturers, the international bankers, the terrorists, the exploiters — cannot be forced to tell their story, to confess, to beg forgiveness, to admit that they are rational beings guilty of willful cruelty and destructive acts. But tales can be told and books can be written about them that might allow for a certain understanding of what they have done and for a judicious empathy. Their deeds bear no rational explanation, follow absurd logical rules, but their madness and their terror can be trapped for us, in all their consuming and illuminating fire, inside stories or “maps” where they can mysteriously lend our folly a kind of enlightened rationality, transparent enough to clarify our behavior and ambiguous enough to help us accept the indefinable.
PART EIGHT
The Numinous Library
“Now I declare that’s too bad!” Humpty Dumpty cried,
breaking into a sudden passion. “You’ve been listening at
doors — and behind trees — and down chimneys — or you
couldn’t have known it!”
“I haven’t indeed!” Alice said very gently. “It’s in a book.”
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 6
Notes Towards a Definition
of the Ideal Library
And noticed that they were filled with cupboards and bookshelves.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 1
THE IDEAL LIBRARY IS MEANT for one particular reader. Every reader must feel that he or she is the chosen one.
Above the door of the ideal library is written a variation of Rabelais’s motto: “LYS CE QUE VOUDRA,” “Read what you will.”
The ideal library is both virtual and material. It allows for every technology, every container, every manifestation of the text.
The ideal library is of easy access. No high stairs, no slippery esplanades, no confusing multiplicity of doors, no intimidating guards must stand between the reader and the books.
The ideal library has comfortable but supportive seats with armrests and a curved back, like those of the lamented Salle Labrouste at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The ideal library has ample desks, preferably with smooth leather tops, sockets for electronic equipment (on condition that they perform in utter silence), and soft individual lights that remind you of the green-glass reading lamps at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires.
In 1250, Richard de Fournival compared the ideal library to a hortus con-clusus, a walled garden.
The ideal library has warm walls of brick or wood, and also cool glass windows that open onto peaceful vistas. The ideal library is never a hortus entirely conclusus.