Centuries later, Dante was to apply this definition to himself: "As fish have water, I have the world as my home."352 He added that though he loved his native Florence to the point of suffering exile for her cause, he could truthfully say, after reading many poets and prose writers, that the earth was full of other places more noble and more beautiful. His vigorous belief in a cosmopolitan library allowed Dante to affirm an independent national identity, yet to see the world as his patrimony and foun- tainhead. For the cosmopolitan reader a homeland is not in space, fractured by political frontiers, but in time, which has no borders. This was why Erasmus, two centuries after Dante, praised Aldus Manutius, the great Venetian printer, for providing readers with a "library without walls," in the shape of his octavo volumes of the classics.353
The cosmopolitan library also lies at the core of Jewish culture. For the Jews, born within an oral tradition, it is paradoxically the Book—the revealed word of God— that stands at the centre of their intellectual and religious experience. For them, the Bible is itself a library, the most complete and reliable library of all, everlasting and all-encompassing, rooted in time and therefore possessed of a constant existence past, present and future. Its words carry more weight than the futile scourges of age and human change, so that even after the destruction of the Second Temple, in a.d. 70, the rabbinical scholars of the Diaspora would discuss in their distant synagogues, as instructed by the Book, the physical rules of conduct to be observed within a building that no longer had a physical being.354 To believe that the library holds a truth greater than that of the time and place in which we stand: this is the intellectual or spiritual allegiance that Seneca was arguing for. This too was the argument held by the Arab scholars of the Middle Ages, for whom libraries existed both "in time, making present the past Greek and Arab ages as exemplary cultural models, and in space, gathering what was dispersed and bringing near what was far away. . . . They rendered visible the invisible, and were concerned with possessing the world."355
Jean Jacques Rousseau was of two minds about this ecumenical sentiment. In Emile he argued that the words patrie (fatherland) and citoyen (citizen) should be deleted from every modern language. But he also insisted, "Distrust those cosmopolitans who seek in the depths of their books the duties they scorn to perform at home. This kind of philosopher professes love for the Tartars, in order to be excused from loving his neighbours."356 Sometime in the mid-seventeenth century, the poet Thomas Traherne penned what we can read today as a premature answer to Rousseau, in a manuscript that remained unpublished for two hundred and fifty years, until it was discovered by chance in a London bookstall and bought for a few pence by a curious collector. Traherne wrote, "You will never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you."357
The notion of a cosmopolitan past was with us for many centuries, perhaps until the pre-Raphaelites introduced the idea of anachronism, a barrier separating what belonged to our present from what belonged to ages gone by. For Sir Thomas Browne or for Erasmus, Plato and Aristotle were fellow debaters. Platonic and Aristotelian ideas were renewed in the minds of Montaigne and Petrarch, and the dialogue was continued throughout the generations, not on a vertical timeline but on a horizontal plane, along the same circular path to knowledge. "Whatever meant reality to our ancestors persists, and is hidden in every kind of art," says the Emperor Augustus in Hermann Broch's The Death ofVirgil.™
"For as though there were a Metempsuchosis," wrote Sir Thomas Browne in 1642, "and the soul of one man passed into another, opinions do find, after certain Revolutions, men and minds like those that first begat them. To see our selves again, we need not look for Plato's year: every man is not only himself; there hath been many Diogenes, and as many Timons, though but few of that name: men are liv'd over again, the world is now as it was in Ages past; there was none then, but there hath been some one since that parallels him, and is, as it were, his revived self."359 For Browne the past is made contemporary through our reading and thinking; the past is a bookshelf open to all, an infinite source of that which then becomes ours by worthy appropriation. There are no copyright laws here, no legal boundaries, no picket fences with the sign "Private, Keep Out."
Closer to our time, the philosopher Richard Rorty drew the following conclusion from Browne 's cosmopolitan vision of history. "The best a prophet or a demiurge can hope for is to say once again what has often been said, but to say it just a little bit better."360 The past is the cosmopolitan's mother country, the universal fatherland, an endless library. In it (so thought Sir Thomas Browne) lies our hope for an endurable future.
At about the same time as Browne was writing these words in his Religio Medici, Gabriel Naude, in his Advice for Setting Up a Library, was rejoicing in the riches a library could afford:
For if it is possible to enjoy in this world a certain sovereign good, a certain perfect and accomplished happiness, I believe that there is none more desirable than the dialogue and the fruitful and pleasant entertainment that a wise man might receive from such a Library, and that it is not so strange a thing to possess Books, ut illi sint coena- tionum ornamenta, quam ut studiorum instrumenta. Since he can rightfully call himself because of it a cosmopolitan or citizen of the whole world, he can know everything, see everything and ignore nothing; in brief, since he is absolute master of this contentment, he can use it as he pleases, take it when he wants to, converse with it as much as he likes, and without obstacles, without labours and without effort he can be instructed and know all the most precise characteristics of Everything that is, that was and that may be/ On earth, in the sea, in the uttermost hiding-places of the Heavens.361