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Stele with the Code ofHammurabi.
centuries after Diodorus, however, the Byzantine patrician Photius, compiler of an encyclopedic bibliography under the title Bibliotheka, or Library, remarked, "We have read the Chronicles of Theopompus, of which only fifty-three volumes have survived." The loss noticed by Diodorus was still true for Photius; that is to say, the awareness of the absence had become part of the work's own history, counterbalancing, in some small measure, the oblivion to which the lost volumes had been condemned.
Trust in the survival of the word, like the urge to forget what words attempt to record, is as old as the first clay tablets stolen from the Baghdad Museum. To hold and transmit memory, to learn through the experience of others, to share knowledge of the world and of ourselves, are some of the powers (and dangers) that books confer upon us, and the reasons why we both treasure and fear them. Four thousand years ago, our ancestors in Mesopotamia already knew this. The Code of Hammurabi—a collection of laws inscribed on a tall, dark stone stele by King Hammurabi of Babylonia in the eighteenth century B.C., and preserved today in the Louvre Museum—offers us, in its epilogue, an enlightened example of what the written word can mean to the common man.
In order to prevent the powerful from oppressing the weak, in order to give justice to the orphans and widows ... I have inscribed on my stele my precious words ... If a man is sufficiently wise to maintain order in the land, may he heed the words I have written on this stele. ... Let the oppressed citizen have the inscriptions read out. . . . The stele will illuminate his case for him. And as he will understand what to expect [from the words of the law], his heart will be set at ease.295
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THE LIBRARY
AS IMAGINATION
It is as easy to dream up a book as it is difficult to put it on paper."
Balzac, Le cabinet des antiques
There are two big sophora trees in my garden, just outside my library windows. During the summer, when friends are visiting, we sit and talk under them, sometimes during the day but usually at night. Inside the library, my books distract us from conversation and we are inclined to silence. But outside, under the stars, talk becomes less inhibited, wider ranging, strangely more stimulating. There is something about sitting outside in the dark that seems conducive to unfettered conversation. Darkness promotes speech. Light is silent—or, as Henry Fielding explains in Amelia, "Tace, madam, is Latin for a candle."296
Tradition tells us that words, not light, came first out of the primordial darkness. According to a Talmudic legend, when God sat down to create the world, the twenty- two letters of the alphabet descended from his terrible and august crown and begged him to effect his creation through them. God consented. He allowed the alphabet to give birth to the heavens and the earth in darkness, and then to bring forth the first ray of light from the earth's core, so that it might pierce the Holy Land and illuminate the entire universe.297 Light, what we take to be light, Sir Thomas Browne tells us, is only the shadow of God, in whose blinding radiance words are no longer possible.298 God's backside was enough to dazzle Moses, who had to wait until he had returned to the darkness of the Sinai in order to read to his people their Lord's commandments. Saint John, with praiseworthy economy, summed up the relationship between letters, light and darkness in one famous line: "In the beginning was the Word."
Saint John's sentence describes the reader's experience. As anyone reading in a library knows, the words on the page call out for light. Darkness, words and light form a virtuous circle. Words bring light into being, and then mourn its passing. In the light we read, in the dark we talk. Urging his father not to allow himself to die, Dylan Thomas pressed now famous words on the old man: "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."299 And Othello too, in agony, confuses the light of candles with the light of life, and sees them as one and the same: "Put out the light," he says, "and then put out the light."300 Words call for light in order to be read, but light seems to oppose the spoken word. When Thomas Jefferson introduced the Argand lamp to New England in the mid- eighteenth century, it was observed that the conversation at dinner tables once lit by candlelight ceased to be as brilliant as before, because those who excelled in talking now took to their rooms to read.301 "I have too much light," says the Buddha, refusing to say another word.302
In one other practical sense, words create light. The Mesopotamian who wished to continue his reading when night had fallen, the Roman who intended to pursue his documents after dinner, the monk in his cell and the scholar in his study after evening prayers, the courtier retiring to his bedchamber and the lady to her boudoir, the child hiding beneath the blankets to read after curfew—all set up the light necessary to illuminate their task. In the Archaeological Museum of Madrid stands an oil lamp from Pompeii by whose light Pliny the Elder may have read his last book, before setting off to die in the eruption of a.d. 79. Somewhere in Stratford, Ontario, is a solitary candleholder that dates back (its owner boasts) to Shakespeare's time; it may once have held a candle whose brief life Macbeth saw as a reflection of his own. The lamps that guided Dante's exiled reading in Ravenna and Racine 's cloistered reading in Port- Royal, Stendhal's in Rome and De Quincey's in London, all were born of words calling out from between their covers; all were light assisting the birth of light.
In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness, we invent our own stories. Many times, under my two trees, I have sat with friends and described books that were never written. We have stuffed libraries with tales we never felt compelled to set down on paper. "To imagine the plot of a novel is a happy task," Borges once said. "To actually write it is an exaggeration."303 He enjoyed filling the spaces of the library he could not see with stories he never bothered to write, but for which he sometimes deigned to compose a preface, summary or review. Even as a young man, he said, the knowledge of his impending blindness had encouraged him in the habit of imagining complex volumes that would never take printed form. Borges had inherited from his father the disease that gradually, implacably weakened his sight, and the doctor had forbidden him to read in dim light. One day, on a train journey, he became so engrossed by a detective novel that he carried on reading, page after page, in the fading dusk. Shortly before his destination, the train entered a tunnel. When it emerged, Borges could no longer see anything except a coloured haze, the "darkness visible" that Milton thought was hell. In that darkness Borges lived for the rest of his life, remembering or imagining stories, rebuilding in his mind the National Library of Buenos Aires or his own restricted library at home. In the light of the first half of his life, he wrote and read silently; in the gloom of the second, he dictated and had others read to him.
In 1955, shortly after the military coup that overthrew the dictatorship of General Peron, Borges was offered the post of director of the National Library. The idea had come from Victoria Ocampo, the formidable editor of Sur magazine and Borges's friend for many years. Borges thought it "a wild scheme" to appoint a blind man as librarian, but then recalled that, oddly enough, two of the previous directors had also been blind: Jose Marmol and Paul Groussac. When the possibility of the appointment was put forward, Borges's mother suggested that they take a walk to the library and look at the building, but Borges felt superstitious and refused. "Not until I get the job,"304 he said. A few days later, he was appointed. To celebrate the occasion, he wrote a poem about "the