Throughout his life, Michelangelo seems to have pursued two conflicting yet complementary ideals of the ancient world. One was the ideal of perfection, the finished quality of Greek art that he and his contemporaries believed gave each of its masterpieces the durable impression of a thing complete unto itself. The other was its fragmentary nature, the result of time and chance that, in the eyes of the Renaissance artists, allowed certain ruins and myriad broken remains to reflect a vanished perfection now implicit in the surviving headless torsos and details of columns177—an aesthetic discovery much exploited later by the inventors of the Gothic revival in the eighteenth century. The Laurentian Library displays both qualities.
Among the many discoveries made by the artists of the Renaissance was the "golden section." Though the concept had been known in ancient Greece and had been used in both Greek and Roman architecture, it was not clearly articulated until 1479, when the mathematician Luca Pacioli, in a book illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci and not printed until ten years later, defined it as "a line cut in such a way that the smaller section is to the greater as the greater is to the whole."178 The pleasing perfection of such a measure cannot be explained mathematically, and therefore held (and still holds today) a magical aesthetic quality, as a physical equilibrium for which there exists no formula. The rectangle of the reading room designed by Michelangelo, whose sides correspond to the ideal proportions dictated by this "golden section," pays homage to the balanced beauty of a Greek temple or a Roman courtyard, and reduces the lovely proportions of our vast universe to a measure pleasing to our human eyes. The stern windows and recurrent volutes, and the complex and dynamic stairway perfectly illustrate the paradoxical nature of a library. The first suggests that it can be an ordered, contained place where our knowledge of the universe can be gracefully stored; the second implies that no order, no method, no elegant design can ever fully hold it.
THE LIBRARY
AS CHANCE
A library's ideal function is to be a little bit like a bouquiniste's stall, a place for trouvailles.
Umberto Eco, "What Is the Name of the Rose?"
A library is not only a place of both order and chaos; it is also the realm of chance. Books, even after they have been given a shelf and a number, retain a mobility of their own. Left to their own devices, they assemble in unexpected formations; they follow secret rules of similarity, unchronicled genealogies, common interests and themes. Left in unattended corners or on piles by our bedside, in cartons or on shelves, waiting to be sorted and catalogued on some future day many times postponed, the stories held by books cluster around what Henry James called a "general intention" that often escapes readers: "the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet."179
For Umberto Eco, a library should have a haphazard, flea-market quality. Sunday morning, a brocante is set up in one of my neighbouring villages. It has none of the pretensions of the well-established flea markets of Paris, nor the prestige of the antiquarian fairs regularly scheduled throughout France. The brocante is a hodgepodge of everything from massive nineteenth-century country furniture to bits of ancient brocade and lace, from chipped pieces of china and crystal to rusty screws and gardening tools, from regrettable oil paintings and anonymous family photos to one-eyed plastic dolls and battered miniature cars. These commercial encampments have the feel of the ancient ruined cities imagined by Stevenson from a child's point of view:
There I'll come when I'm a man With a camel caravan; Light a fire in the gloom Of some dusty dining-room; See the pictures on the walls, Heroes, fights, and festivals; And in a corner find the toys Of the old Egyptian boys.180
At the brocante, my own interest usually lies in the crate- fuls of postcards, prints, calendars and especially books. Sometimes the books are displayed under an obvious banner: history of the region or New Age arcana, animal husbandry or love stories. But most of the time they pile up haphazardly, single volumes of leather-bound eighteenth-century translations of Homer together with shabby wartime Simenons, fine editions of signed novels (I found a 1947 copy of Colette's Cheri, mysteriously inscribed "To Gloriane, who attempts to 'repair' women and who miraculously succeeds," in a box of "2 x 8 euros"), together with countless long-forgotten American bestsellers.
Books come together because of the whims of a collector, the avatars of a community, the passing of war and time, because of neglect, care, the imponderability of survival, the random culling of the rag-and-bone trade, and it may take centuries before their congregation acquires the identifiable shape of a library. Every library, as Dewey discovered, must have an order, and yet not every order is willed or logically structured. There are libraries that owe their creation to affectations of taste, to casual offerings and encounters. In the desert of Adrar, in central Mauritania, the oasis cities of Chinguetti and Ouadane still house dozens of age-old libraries whose very existence is due to the whims of passing caravans laden with spices, pilgrims, salt and books. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, these cities were obligatory halting points on the route to Mecca. The books deposited here throughout the years, for reasons of trade or safety—treasures that included works from the celebrated Koranic schools of Granada and Baghdad, Cairo and Meknes, Cordoba and Byzantium—are lodged now in the private homes of several distinguished families. In Chinguetti, for instance—an oasis that boasted twelve mosques and twenty-five thousand inhabitants during its golden age in the eighteenth century—five or six families among the remaining three thousand souls now keep, for the curious reader, over ten thousand volumes of astronomy, sociology, commentaries on the Koran, grammar, medicine and poetry.181 Many of these were borrowed from travelling scholars and copied by the librarians of these erudite cities; sometimes, reversing the process, students would arrive here and spend
Image not available
Reading-room in the Habott Library, Mauritania.
months copying out one of the books kept on the library shelves.
A story is told in Ouadane of a beggar who, early in the fifteenth century, appeared at the city gates, famished and dressed in tatters. He was taken into the mosque, fed and clothed, but no one succeeded in making him reveal his name or the city of his birth. All the man seemed to care for was spending long hours among the books of Ouadane, reading in complete silence. Finally, after several months of such mysterious behaviour, the imam lost his patience and said to the beggar, "It is written that he who keeps knowledge to himself shall not be made welcome in the Kingdom of Heaven. Each reader is but one chapter in the life of a book, and unless he passes his knowledge on to others, it is as if he condemned the book to be buried alive. Do you wish such a fate for the books who have served you so well?" Hearing this, the man opened his mouth and gave a lengthy and marvellous commentary on the sacred text he happened to have before him. The imam realized that his visitor was a certain celebrated scholar who, despairing of the deafness of the world, had promised to hold his tongue until he came to a place where learning was truly honoured.182