It may be that, of all the instruments we have invented to help us along the path of self-discovery, books are the most useful, the most practical, the most concrete. By lending words to our bewildering experience, books become compasses that embody the four cardinal points: mobility and stability, self-reflection and the gift of looking outward. The old metaphor that sees the world as a book we read and in which we too are read merely recognizes this guiding, all-encompassing quality. In a book, no one point is exclusively the north, since whichever is chosen, the other three remain actively present. Even after Ulysses has returned home to sit by his quiet hearth, Ithaca remains a port of call on the shores of the beckoning sea, one among the countless volumes of the universal library; Dante, reaching the supreme vision of love holding bound “into one volume all the leaves whose flight / Is scattered through the universe around” (legato con amore in un volume, / ciò che per l’universo si squaderna), feels his will and his desire turned by that love “that moves the sun and the other stars” (ma già volgeva il mio disio e l’velie, / sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa, / l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle). Likewise the reader who in the end finds the page written for him, a part of the vast, monstrous volume made up by all the libraries and lending sense to the universe.
And yet, almost all the depictions of the Wandering Jew show him bookless, keen on finding salvation in the world of flesh and stone, not that of words. This feels wrong. In the most popular of the fictionalized versions, Eugène Sue’s nineteenth-century roman-feuilleton, Le Juif errant, the underlying theme is the wicked Jesuit plot to govern the world; the intellectual undertakings of the timeless Wanderer himself are not explored. On Ahasuerus’s ongoing journey (according to Sue) libraries are merely gathering rooms in aristocratic houses, and books either pious tracts or evil catalogues of sin under the guise of Jesuitical confession manuals.
But it is hard to believe that a merciful God would condemn anyone to a worldwide waiting room without reading material. Instead, I imagine Ahasuerus granted two thousand years of itinerant reading; I imagine him visiting the world’s great libraries and bookstores, exhausting and replenishing his book bag with whatever new titles appear during his travels, from Marco Polo’s Il milione to Cervantes’s Don Quixote, from Xueqin Cao’s Dream of Red Mansions to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, in which (like all readers) he will find traces of his own curious destiny. Closer to our time, so as not be overladen, the Wanderer travels perhaps with an e-book, which he periodically recharges at an Internet café. And in his reader’s mind, the pages, printed and virtual, overlay and blend and create new stories from a colossal mass of remembered and half-remembered readings, multiplying his books by a thousand, again and again.
And yet, even in the Universal Library, the Wandering Jew, like the Ideal Reader, can never be satisfied, can never be limited by the circumference of one Ithaca, of one quest, of one book. For him the horizon of every page must always — thankfully, we say—exceed his wit and his grasp, so that every last page becomes the first. Because, as we have said, every book once ended leads to another lying patiently in wait, and every rereading grants the book a Protean new life. Ahasuerus’s library (which, like all the best readers, he carries mainly in his head) echoes through mirrored galleries that gloss and comment on every text. Every library is a library of memory: first, because it holds the experience of the past, and second, because it lives on in the mind of each of its readers.
The Jews know this practice well. Long after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, Jews in scattered lands continued to carry out the appointed rituals, moving about in a space that no longer existed in stone and mortar, but only in the words set down for their guidance. That is the nature of all exile: it affirms the perseverance of memory. Expelled from their native al-Andalus, the Arabs of Córdoba, Toledo, and Granada continued to recite the verses that their Spanish landscape had inspired; as refugees in South America and Canada, the Armenians who survived the Turkish massacre rewrote the libraries destroyed in their Anatolian homeland; the survivors of the military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina created publishing companies in their new countries for the literature that continued to be written in spite of the blood-imposed silence; in Paris, the Cubans who fled Castro’s regime borrowed the French language and tailored it to suit the retelling of their stories; in London, Mahmoud Darwich blended the Palestinian cadence of his verses with his readings of Borges, Paul Eluard, and Emily Dickinson; Vladimir Nabokov carried with him into his American exile the Russian dictionary which held, he said, the building blocks of all his childhood reading. The examples are, unfortunately, countless. The condemned crowds outside the city walls, Ahasuerus’s traveling companions in the detention camps of Calais, Lampedusa, Málaga, and scores of other places carrying with them the tattered libraries of their past, are so vast and varied that our protected inner citadels seem desolate and despoiled by comparison. In our anxiety to punish our enemies and protect ourselves, we have forgotten what it is that we are meant to be securing. In our exacerbated fear, we have allowed our own rights and freedoms to be distorted or curtailed. Instead of locking the other out we have locked ourselves in. We have forgotten that our libraries should open onto the world, not pretend to isolate us from it. We have become our own prisoners.
That is the deeper meaning of the Wandering Jew’s punishment, and its inevitable consequence, because no curse is ever one-sided. The legend of the man condemned to wander because of an uncharitable act became an uncharitable act in which many men were condemned to wander. Pogroms, expulsions, ethnic cleansings, genocides regardless of nationality or creed are the abominable extensions of this reading of the legend. But I suggest there might be others, like the one I intuited as a child when I first heard the story.
Eternal wandering as a punishment or as an enlightening exploration of the world; a fine and private place as a reward or as the dreaded and silent grave; the “other” as an anonymous enemy or as a reflection of ourselves; ourselves as single, solitary creatures or as part of a multitudinous, timeless, world-conscious being. Perhaps Christ’s words to the Jewish cobbler were meant not to punish but to teach that charity is of the essence, because, as we are told by Saint Paul, charity “rejoiceth in truth.” Perhaps what Christ meant was that in order to learn why the underdog must not be mocked and why the needy must not be pushed away from our door we must go out into the world and live among our neighbors and be the underdog, the needy, and understand that, whoever and wherever we are, we always wander outside a city wall.
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.