The ideal library holds mainly, but not only, books. It also collects maps, pictures, objects, music, voices, films, and photographs. The ideal library is a reading place in the broadest meaning of the term.
The ideal library allows every reader access to the stacks. A reader must be granted the freedom of chance encounters.
No shelf in the ideal library is higher or lower than the reach of the reader’s arm. The ideal library does not require acrobatics.
In the ideal library it is never too warm or too cold.
The ideal library organizes without labeling.
No section in the ideal library is conclusive.
The map of the ideal library is its catalogue.
The ideal library has easy and plentiful access to food, drink, and photocopying machines.
The ideal library is both secluded and public, intimate and open to social intercourse, meant for meditation and for dialogue, parsimonious and generous, erudite and questioning, full of the despair of plenty and the hope of what has not yet been read.
The ideal library holds the promise of every possible book.
Every book in the ideal library has its echo in another.
The ideal library is an everlasting, ever-renewed anthology.
The ideal library has no closing hours.
The ideal library allows scribbling in its books.
The ideal library is both popular and secret. It holds all the acknowledged classics and all the classics known to only a few readers. In the ideal library Dante’s Commedia sits next to Phil Cousineau’s Deadlines, Montaigne’s Essays next to Eduardo Lourengo’s Montaigne, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary next to Edgardo Cozarinsky’s The Bride of Odessa, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov next to Lazlo Floldenyi’s Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears.
In the ideal library, the reader’s task is to subvert the established order.
The number of books in the ideal library varies. The Library of Alexandria is said to have held seven hundred thousand scrolls; Jorge Luis Borges’s bookshelves contained barely five hundred volumes; the Birkenau concentration camp for children had a clandestine library of eight precious books that had to be hidden away in a different place every night.
Even when built out of walls and shelves and books, the ideal library is in the mind. The ideal library is the remembered library.
The ideal library suggests one continuous text with no discernable beginning and no foreseeable end.
In the ideal library there are no forbidden books and no recommended books.
The ideal library is familiar both to Saint Jerome and to Noam Chomsky.
In the ideal library no reader ever feels unwanted.
Every page in the ideal library is the first. None is the last.
Like Paul Valéry’s boxes in the brain, the ideal library has sections inscribed thus: To study on a more favorable occasion. Never to be thought about. Useless to go into further. Contents unexamined. Pointless business. Known treasure that can only be examined in a second life. Urgent. Dangerous. Delicate. Impossible. Abandoned. Reserved. Let others deal with this! My strong point. Difficult. Etc.
The ideal library disarms the curse of Babel.
The ideal library symbolizes everything a society stands for. A society depends on its libraries to know who it is because libraries are society’s memory.
The ideal library can grow endlessly without demanding more physical space, and can offer knowledge of everything without demanding more physical time. As a beautiful impossibility, the ideal library exists outside time and outside space.
Ancient ossuaries bore the inscription “What you are, we once were; what we are, you shall be.” Much the same can be said of the ideal library’s books and of their readers.
The ideal library is not an ossuary.
Some of the earliest libraries were kept by Egyptian priests, who furnished the departed souls with books to guide them through the kingdom of the dead. The ideal library maintains this soul-guiding function.
The ideal library both renews and preserves its collection. The ideal library is fluid.
There are certain books that, in themselves, are an ideal library. Examples: Melville’s Moby-Dick, Dante’s Commedia, Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe.
No compass is necessary in the ideal library. Its physical appearance is also its intellectual structure.
The architect of the ideal library is, first and foremost, an ideal reader.
The impossible task of every tyrant is to destroy the ideal library.
The impossible task of every reader is to rebuild the ideal library.
The ideal library (like every library) holds at least one line that has been written exclusively for you.
The Library of the
Wandering Jew
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see,
it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.
If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice
as fast as that.”
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 2
WHEN I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD, my family spent a summer in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a postcard Alpine village with geranium-filled balconies, heart-shaped openings in the shutters, and orange cows that waddled through the little streets at dusk, sounding their copper bells. In those days, I had no sense of my social or cultural identity: I didn’t know that my family was Jewish, and therefore I had no notion of how strange it was for a Jewish family to choose, as a holiday destination less than a decade after the war, a village that had been one of Hitler’s favorite haunts. Deep-blue woods rose on the surrounding slopes, and often we trekked up the shaded paths to one of the hilltops for a picnic. One of these paths was a via Crucis, each station sculpted in wood and set high up on a pole: fourteen little scenes that led, as through a comic strip, from Christ’s trial and sentencing to the laying out of his body in the tomb. My nurse (a Czech Jew who had escaped the Nazis, and who possessed little imagination and less humor) knew the story of the Passion only vaguely, and her explanation of the various images never quite satisfied me. One scene, however, that of Christ’s third fall, she seemed to know well. Christ, having stumbled twice under the weight of the Cross, stumbles once more, this time by the door of a Jewish cobbler called Ahasuerus. The cobbler pitilessly pushes Christ away, telling him to move on. “I will move on,” Christ answers, “but you will tarry till I come!” From that day onwards, Ahasuerus is condemned to wander the earth and is only allowed to stop here and there for short respites. His shoes and his clothes never wear out completely, and every hundred years he is miraculously rejuvenated. His beard hangs down to his feet, he carries five coins in his pocket that match the five wounds of the man he offended, and he is able to speak every language in the world. Since he is a little over two thousand years old, he has witnessed countless events of historical importance and knows every story there is to tell.
Though the Eternal Wanderer, condemned because of a sin committed or a promise not kept, has a few precursors in Jewish, Islamic, and early Christian and even Buddhist literature, the story as we know it first makes its appearance some time in the thirteenth century. The earliest datable telling is Italian, tucked away in a Bolognese chronicle spanning the years 781 to 1228. In 1223, according to the chronicle, a group of pilgrims arrived at the abbey of Ferrara and informed the abbot that when traveling in Armenia, they had met a certain Jew who had revealed to them that he had been present at the Passion and had driven Christ from his door, and was thus cursed till the Second Coming. “This Jew,” the chronicle explains, “is said, every hundred years, to be made young to the age of thirty, and he cannot die until the Lord returns.”