The bookcases in the bedroom held volumes of poetry and one of the largest collections of Anglo- Saxon and Icelandic literature in Latin America. Here Borges kept the books he needed to study what he called "the harsh and laborious words/ That, with lips now turned to dust,/ I mouthed in the days of Northumbria and Mercia/ Before becoming Haslam or Borges":200 Skeat's Etymological Dictionary, an annotated version of The Battle ofMaldon, Richard Meyer's Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte. The other bookcase contained the poems of Enrique Banchs, of Heine, of San Juan de la Cruz, and many commentaries on Dante. Mysteriously absent from his bookshelves were Proust, Racine, Goethe's Faust, Milton and the Greek tragedies (all of which he had, of course, read and mentioned in his writings).
Absent too were his own books. He would proudly tell visitors who asked to see an early edition that he didn't possess a single volume that carried (he would say) "that eminently forgettable" name. The truth is that he didn't need them. Though he pretended not to remember, he could recite by heart poems learned many decades earlier, and correct and alter in his memory his own writings, usually to the stupefaction and delight of his listeners. Shortly after his death, his widow, Maria Kodama, donated the majority of his books to a foundation in Buenos Aires bearing his name, and from time to time certain volumes are shown in exhibitions organized in his honour. Lying open in glass cases, stripped of their surroundings, honoured but unread—less purveyors of words than funerary objects, expelled from their home after his death—books seem to suffer the fate of the spouses and servants of those ancient kings whose households followed their master to the grave.
A study lends its owner, its privileged reader, what Seneca called euthymia, a Greek word which Seneca explained means "well-being of the soul," and which he translated as "tranquillitas."im Every study ultimately aspires to euthymia. Euthymia, memory without distraction, the intimacy of a reading time—a secret period in the communal day—that is what we seek in a private reading space. According to Blake,
There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find,
Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, but the Industrious find
This Moment & it multiply, & when it once is found
It renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed.202
Though we primarily seek euthymia in these private moments, we can sometimes discover it in the communal space of a public library. In Mameluke Cairo, in the fifteenth century, though there were indeed scholars who worked in their own private rooms, readers of lesser means were encouraged to visit the public libraries of schools and mosques. Here, books were made available to those who could not afford to buy them; here, they could copy out the desired works for their own use, whether to learn texts by heart or study them at leisure. The thirteenth-century scholar Ibn Jama'a, though recommending that students purchase books whenever possible, thought it most important that they be "carried in the heart" and not merely kept on a shelf. Copying out texts helped one commit them to memory, thereby building (he thought) a sort of parallel library to the one of ink and paper. "The student should always have with him an inkwell, so as to be able to write down useful things he hears," Ibn Jama'a advised.203 It was understood that the written text supported the text learned by heart, since "what is only memorized flies away, what is written down remains" (an Islamic version of the Latin verba volant, scripta manent).m According to Ibn Jama'a, the art of memory was akin to that of architecture, since by practising it a reader could build to his taste a private palace furnished with collected treasures, declaring ownership of the texts he had chosen in a deep and definitive way. To sharpen the skill of memorizing books, the use of honey, toothpicks and twenty-one raisins a day was recommended, while the consumption of coriander and eggplant was deemed deleterious. Ibn Jama'a also advised against "reading inscriptions on tombs, walking between camels haltered in a line, or flicking away lice,"205 all activities that affected the keenness of memory.
At the end of the fifteenth century, to exercise his memory among the books he knew best, Niccolo Machiavelli preferred to read in his study at night—the time when he found it easiest to enjoy those qualities which for him most defined the relationship of a reader and his books: intimacy and leisured thought. "When evening comes," he wrote, "I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, for which I was born. There I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives for their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the course of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexations, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass into their world."206
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THE LIBRARY
AS MIND
... to give visible form to the psychic presence and to the movements of the soul.
Aby Warburg, Ausgewahlfe 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.