Aby Warburg died in 1929, at the age of sixty-three. Three years after his death, a couple of volumes of his collected works appeared in Germany; they were the last to be published in his homeland for a long time. Fragmented and wonderfully far-ranging, his writings are yet another version of his library, another representation of the intricacies of his thought, another map of his extraordinary mind. He wanted his intuition to conclude in scientific laws; he would have liked to believe that the thrill and terror of art and literature were steps towards understanding cause and function. And yet, again and again, he returned to the notion of memory as desire, and desire itself as knowledge. In one of his fragments he writes "that the work of art is something hostile moving towards the beholder."232 With his library
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One ofWarburg's "Mnemosyne"panels.
he attempted to create a space in which that hostility would not be tamed (something he realized could not be done without destruction) but lovingly reflected back, with curiosity, respect and awe, a mirror of his curious, intelligent mind.
In 1933, following the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor of the Reich, the Warburg library and staff emigrated to England. Six hundred boxes of books plus furniture and equipment were shipped across the sea to London. I like to imagine the many barges crossing the water, laden with the volumes assembled over the years, a fragmented portrait of their owner—a reader now dead, but present in this dismantled representation of his library about to be reshaped in a foreign land. The books were first accommodated in an office building in Millbank; three years later, the University of London agreed to house the collection but not rebuild the oval shelves. On 28 November 1944, the Warburg Institute was finally incorporated in the university, where it still functions today. Fifty-one years later, a copy of Warburg's house was built in Hamburg on the site of his old home on the Heilwigstrasse, and an attempt was made, based on original photographs, to reproduce the shelving and the display of part of his collection, so that anyone who visits the house and stands for a moment in the reading room can feel as if Warburg's mind is still at work among his memorable and changing shelves.
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THE LIBRARY
AS ISLAND
An old man is always a Crusoe.
Francois Mauriac, Nouveaux memoires interieurs
More than three hundred years before the Warburg library crossed the sea to England, another, more modest library was shipwrecked on the coast of a desert island somewhere in the South Pacific. On one of the early days of October of the year 1659, Robinson Crusoe returned to the mangled remains of his craft and managed to bring ashore a number of tools and various kinds of food, as well as "several things of less value" such as pens, ink, paper and a small collection of books. Of these books, a few were in Portuguese, a couple were "Popish prayer-books" and three were "very good Bibles." His "dreadful deliverance" had left him terrified of death through starvation, but once the tools and the food had met his material needs he was ready to seek entertainment from the ship's meagre store of books. Robinson Crusoe was the founder—if a reluctant founder—of a new society. And Daniel Defoe, his author, thought it necessary
Robinson Crusoe and Friday.
that at the beginning of a new society there should be books.
We might be tempted to guess what these "several Portuguese books" were. Probably a copy of Camoes's Lusiads, a fitting book in a ship's collection; perhaps the sermons of the illustrious Antonio Vieira, including the wonderful "Sermon of Saint Anthony to the Fishes," in which Crusoe might have read a defence of the brothers of the savage Friday; most certainly the Peregrination of Fernao Mendes Pinto, which tells of strange voyages through the still mysterious Orient and which the omnivorous Defoe knew well. We can't tell precisely what those books were, because in spite of keeping a diary in which he dutifully recorded the changes of weather and mood, Crusoe never wrote any more about the books. Perhaps, true to the English conviction that English is the only language a gentleman requires, he was unable to read Portuguese. Whatever the reason, he seems very soon to have forgotten the books entirely, and when he leaves the island almost thirty years later, on 11 June 1687, and makes a detailed list of his possessions, he doesn't breathe a word about those anonymous volumes.
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He does tell us, however, of his uses of the Bible. It colours each of his actions, it dictates the meaning of hissufferings, it is the instrument through which he will try, Prospero-like, to make a useful servant out of Friday. Crusoe writes, "I explained to [Friday], as well as I could, why our blessed Redeemer took not on Him the nature of angels but the seed of Abraham, and how for that reason the fallen angels had no share in the redemption; that he came only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel, and the like." And he adds, with disarming frankness, "I had, God knows, more sincerity than knowledge in all the methods I took for this poor creature's instruction."
For Crusoe the book is not only an instrument of instruction but also one of divination. Some time later, sunk in despair, trying to understand his pitiful condition, he opens the Bible and finds this sentence: "I will never, never leave thee, nor forsake thee," and immediately it seems to him that these words are meant for his eyes especially. On that faraway coast, starting over with a few odds and ends from society's ruins—seeds, guns and the Word of God—he constructs a new world at whose centre the Holy Bible shines its fierce and ancient light.
We can live in a society founded on the book and yet not read, or we can live in a society where the book is merely an accessory and be, in the deepest, truest sense, a reader. As a society the Greeks, for instance, cared little for books, and yet individually they were assiduous readers.233 Aristotle, whose books (as we know them today) were probably lecture notes taken down by his students, read voraciously, and his own library was the first in ancient Greece of which there is any certain information.234 Socrates—who despised books because he thought they were a threat to our gift of memory, and never deigned to leave a written word—chose to read the speech of the orator Lycias, not to hear it recited by the enthusiastic Phaedrus.235 Crusoe would perhaps have elected to have the text recited to him, if he'd been given the choice. Even though this representative of a book- centred Judeo-Christian society "read daily the Word of God," as he tells us himself, Crusoe was not a keen reader of the Bible, his Book of Power (to borrow Luther's phrase). He consulted it daily—as he would have consulted the Internet had it existed, and allowed himself to be guided by it. But he did not make the Word his, as Saint Augustine insisted we must do, "incarnating" the written text.236 He merely accepted society's reading of it. Had Crusoe been shipwrecked at the end of our millennium, it is easy to imagine him rescuing from the ship not the Book of Power but a PowerBook.