This page intentionally left blank
CONCLUSION
Books are our best possessions in life, they are our immortality. I deeply regret never having possessed a library of my own.
Varlam Chalamov, My Libraries
We have always wanted to remember more, and we will continue, I believe, to weave webs to catch words in the hope that somehow, in the sheer quantity of accumulated utterances, in a book or on a screen, there will be a sound, a phrase, a spelled-out thought that will carry the weight of an answer. Every new technology has advantages over the previous one, but necessarily lacks some of its predecessor's attributes. Familiarity, which no doubt breeds contempt, breeds also comfort; that which is unfamiliar breeds distrust. My grandmother, born in the Russian countryside at the end of the nineteenth century, was afraid of using that new invention called the telephone when it was first introduced to her neighbourhood in Buenos Aires, because, she said, it didn't allow her to see the face of the person she was speaking to. "It makes me think of ghosts," she explained.
Electronic text that requires no page can amicably accompany the page that requires no electricity; they need not exclude each other in an effort to serve us best. Human imagination is not monogamous nor does it need to be, and new instruments will soon sit next to the PowerBooks that now sit next to our books in the multimedia library. If the Library of Alexandria was the emblem of our ambition of omniscience, the Web is the emblem of our ambition of omnipresence; the library that contained everything has become the library that contains anything. Alexandria modestly saw itself as the centre of a circle bound by the knowable world; the Web, like the definition of God first imagined in the twelfth century,'62 sees itself as a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
And yet the new sense of infinity created by the Web has not diminished the old sense of infinity inspired by the ancient libraries; it has merely lent it a sort of tangible intangibility. There may come a new technique of collecting information next to which the Web will seem to us habitual and homely in its vastness, like the aged buildings that once lodged the national libraries in Paris and Buenos Aires, Beyrouth and Salamanca, London and Seoul.
Solid libraries of wood and paper, or libraries of ghostly flickering screens, stand as proof of our resilient belief in a timeless, far-reaching order that we dimly intuit or perceive. During the Czech insurrection against the Nazis in May 1945, when Russian troops were entering Prague, the librarian Elena Sikorskaja, Vladimir Nabokov's sister, realized that the German officers now attempting to retreat had not returned several of the books they had borrowed from the library she worked in. She and a colleague decided to reclaim the truant volumes, and set out on a rescue mission through the streets down which the Russian trucks were victoriously bundling. "We reached the house of a German pilot who returned the books quite calmly," she wrote to her brother a few months later. "But by now they would let no one cross the main road, and everywhere there were Germans with machine guns,"'6' she complained. In the midst of the confusion and chaos, it seemed important to her that the library's pathetic attempt at order should, as far as possible, be preserved.
However appealing we may find the dream of a knowable universe made of paper and a meaningful cosmos made of words, a library, even one colossal in its proportions or ambitious and infinite in its scope, can never offer us a "real" world, in the sense in which the daily world of suffering and happiness is real. It offers us instead a negotiable image of that real world which (in the words of the French critic Jean Roudaut) "kindly allows us to conceive it,"'64 as well as the possibility of experience, knowledge and memory of something intuited through a tale or guessed at through a poetic or philosophical reflection.
Saint John, in a moment of confusion, tells us not to love the world or the things that are in the world because "all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world."'65 This injunction is at best a paradox. Our humble and astonishing inheritance is the world and only the world, whose existence we constantly test (and prove) by telling ourselves stories about it. The suspicion that we and the world are made in the image of something wonderfully and chaotically coherent far beyond our grasp, of which we are also part; the hope that our exploded cosmos and we, its stardust, have an ineffable meaning and method; the delight in retelling the old metaphor of the world as a book we read and in which we too are read; the conceit that what we can know of reality is an imagination made of language—all this finds its material manifestation in that self-portrait we call a library. And our love for it, and our lust to see more of it, and our pride in its accomplishments as we wander through shelves full of books that promise more and more delights, are among our happiest, most moving proofs of possessing, in spite of all the miseries and sorrows of this life, a more intimate, consolatory, perhaps redeeming faith in a method behind the madness than any jealous deity could wish upon us.
In her novel The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald says, "If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching."'66 The story of my library certainly began with finding: finding my books, finding the place in which to lodge them, finding the quiet in the space lit under the darkness outside. But if the story must end with searching, the question has to be: searching for what? Northrop Frye once observed that, had he been present at the birth of Christ, he did not think he would have heard the angels singing. "The reason why I think so is that I do not hear them now, and there is no reason to suppose that they have stopped."'67 Therefore, I am not searching for revelation of any kind, since anything said to me is necessarily limited by what I'm capable of hearing and understanding. Not for knowledge beyond what, in some secret way, I already know. Not for illumination, to which I can't reasonably aspire. Not for experience, since ultimately I can only become aware of what is already in me. For what, then, do I search, at the end of my library's story?
Consolation, perhaps. Perhaps consolation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Those who read, those who
tell us what they read, Those who noisily turn
the pages of their books, Those who have power over red and black ink, and over pictures, Those are the ones who lead us,
guide us, show us the way.
Aztec Codex from 1524, Vatican Archives
While writing this book, I have contracted many debts. In the alphabetical order dear to libraries, my thanks:
To my friends and colleagues Enis Batur, Anders Bjornsson, Antoine Boulad, Roberto Calasso, Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda, Viviane Flament, Dieter Hein, Chris Herschdorfer, Patricia Jaunet, Marie Korey, Richard Landon, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Hubert Nyssen, Felicidad Orqum, Lucie Pabel and Gottwalt Pankow, Dominique Papon, Fabrice Pataut, Arturo Ramoneda, Sylviane Sambord, Alberto Ruy Sanchez, Maud Stephan-Hachem, Jean-Luc Terradillos.
To the staff of the London Library and of the Mediatheque de Poitiers, and to Anne-Catherine Sutermeister and Silvia Kimmeier of the Bibliotheque Cantonale et Universitaire de Lausanne.
To my agents, Michele Lapautre in Paris, Guillermo Schavelzon in Barcelona, Ruth Weibel in Zurich,
Bruce Westwood and Nicole Winstanley and the staff at Westwood Creative Artists in Toronto.
To Gena Gorrell, whose critical, unrelenting, meticulous reading cleared the book of a vast number of errors and fatuities. To Deirdre Molina, for her painstaking care in following the book from manuscript to print. To C.S. Richardson, for another splendid book design. To Liba Berry, for the excellent proofread. To Michelle MacAleese, for her thorough photo research. To Barney Gilmore, for the comprehensive index.