My library consists half of books I remember and half of books I have forgotten. Now that my memory is not as keen as it used to be, pages fade as I attempt to conjure them up. Some vanish from my experience entirely, unrecalled and invisible. Others haunt me temptingly with a title or an image, or a few words out of context. What novel begins with the words "One spring evening of 1890"? Where did I read that King Solomon used a looking-glass to discover whether the Queen of Sheba had hairy legs? Who wrote that peculiar book Flight into
Darkness, from which I remember only the description of a blind corridor full of birds flapping their wings? In what story did I read the phrase "the lumber room of his library"? What volume showed a burning candle on the cover, with thick crayons on cream-coloured paper? Somewhere in my library are the answers to these questions, but I have forgotten where.
Visitors often ask if I've read all my books; my usual answer is that I've certainly opened every one of them. The fact is that a library, whatever its size, need not be read in its entirety to be useful; every reader profits from a fair balance between knowledge and ignorance, recall and oblivion. In 1930 Robert Musil imagined a devoted librarian who, working in Vienna's Imperial Library, knows every single title in that gigantic assembly. "Do you want to know how I've been able to familiarize myself with every one of these books?" he asks an astonished visitor. "Nothing prevents me from telling you: it is because I read none of them!" And he adds, "The secret of every good librarian is never to read anything of all the literature with which he is entrusted, except the titles and the tables of contents. He who puts his nose inside the book itself is lost to the library! . . . Never will he be able to possess a view of the whole!" Hearing these words, Musil tells us, the visitor wants to do one of two things—either burst into tears or light a cigarette—but he knows that within the library walls both options are denied him.277
I have no feeling of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days. They don't require that I pretend to know them all, nor do they urge me to become one of the "professional book-handlers" imagined by Flann O'Brien, who greedily collect books but do not read them, and who could (says O'Brien) earn their living "handling" books for a modest fee, making them look read, annotating the margins with forged comments and inscriptions, and even inserting theatre programs and other ephemera as bookmarks between the virgin leaves.278
Edward Gibbon, commenting on the voluminous library and crowded harem of the Roman emperor Gordian the Younger in the third century A.D., noted approvingly, "Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that both the one and the other were designed for use rather than for ostentation."279 Of course, no one except a mad prodigy would think of reading through a sixty-two- thousand-volume library, page after page, from Abbott to Zwingli, committing every book to memory, even if such a feat were possible. Gordian must have employed what Samuel Johnson, sixteen centuries later, called the cursory mode of reading. Johnson himself read with no method or discipline, sometimes leaving books uncut and following the text only where the pages fell open. "I do not suppose," he said, "that what is in the pages that are closed is worse than what is in the open pages." He never felt the obligation to read a book to the end or to start at the first page. "If a man begins to read in the middle of a book, and feels an inclination to go on, let him not quit it to go to the beginning. He may perhaps not feel again the inclination." He thought it "strange advice" to urge someone to finish a book once started. "You may as well resolve that whatever men you happen to get acquainted with, you are to keep to them for life," he argued. Nor would he necessarily seek out specific titles, but simply open whatever books he might come upon. Luck, he felt, was as good a counsellor as scholarship.
Johnson's obsessive biographer, James Boswell, mentions that when Johnson was a boy, "having imagined that his brother had hid some apples behind a large folio upon an upper shelf in his father's shop, he climbed up to search for them. There were no apples; but the large folio proved to be Petrarch, whom he had seen mentioned, in some preface, as one of the restorers of learning. His curiosity having been thus excited, he sat down with avidity, and read a great part of the book." I am all too familiar with such happy encounters.
The forgotten volumes of my library lead a tacit, unobtrusive existence. And yet, their very quality of having been forgotten allows me, sometimes, to rediscover a certain story, a certain poem, as if it were utterly new. I open a book I think I have never opened before and come upon a splendid line that I tell myself I mustn't forget, and then I close the book and see, on an endpaper, that my wiser, younger self marked that particular passage when he first discovered it at the age of twelve or thirteen. Lethe does not restore my innocence, but it allows me to be once more the boy who didn't know who had murdered Roger Ackroyd, or who wept over the fate of Anna Karenina. I begin again at the first words, aware that I can't truly begin again; I feel bereft of an experience that I know I've already had, and that I must acquire once more, like a second skin. In ancient Greece, the snake was Lethe 's symbol.
But there are libraries in which oblivion (or the attempt at oblivion) is sought precisely in order to discourage rediscovery. The already-mentioned censored libraries, the officious bureaucratic libraries, the scholarly libraries intent on documenting only that which aca- demia considers to be true—all these belong to a dark and skulking breed. In an amusing book on the values of oblivion, the German scholar Harald Weinrich notes that a certain scientific frame of mind works along the lines of deliberate exclusion, so that, for instance, the library of scientific publications from which the Nobel Prize committee chooses its recipients is limited by the following four rules of enforced forgetting:
That which has been published in a language other than English . . . forget it.
That which has been published in a style different from that of the rewarded article . . . forget it.
That which has not been published in one of the prestigious magazines X, Y or Z ... forget it.
That which was published more than fifty years ago . . . forget it.280
If reading is a craft that allows us to remember the common experience of humankind, it follows that totalitarian governments will try to suppress the memory held by the page. Under such circumstances, the reader's struggle is
against oblivion. After the bombing of Kabul in 2001, Shah Muhammad, a librarian—cum—bookseller who had survived various regimes of intolerance, described his experience to a journalist.281 He had opened his store thirty years earlier and had somehow managed to elude the executioners. His inspiration to resist for the sake of his books, he said, came from a verse by Firdausi, the celebrated tenth-century Persian poet, in The Book of Kings: "When facing a great danger, act sometimes as the wolf does, sometimes as the sheep." Meekly Shah Muhammad bound his books in red during the dogmatic Communist regime, and pasted strips of paper over the images of living things during the iconoclastic reign of the Taliban. "But the communists burned my books. . . .
The Afghan bookseller Shah Muhammad Rais in Kabul.