To see the world clearly, you must have dreamed of seeing it, says Bachelard. Although not everything we dream is remembered. I have no memory of any dreams in the library, yet the fear of seeing it burning feels real.
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No book not written in the fury of madness interests me.
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Luciano Canfora has studied the phenomenon of bibliomania. He points out that the libraries of the Athenian scholars before Aristotle contained few books. Euripides had quite a few books and Aristophanes mocked him for it, knowing that this would win him the favor of the public. The same was true in Rome, at least until Aemilius Paullus brought the library of the Macedonian kings to the city. Old Cato had made himself the books he considered strictly necessary, which were those with which he had taught his children to read. At that time, gentlemen were not yet distinguished by their possession of books or private libraries. This would become a symbol of “rank” and even “modernity” in the following century.
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Those who do not read novels imagine a world without novels without thinking that such a world is utterly novelistic.
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If it is true, as Susan Sontag reminds us, that each era must reinvent its own project of spirituality, then the library would be the prolongation in time of an idea of culture based on two conditions: knowledge and aesthetic pleasure.
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I try to read in a certain order. I spend time handling books. I make reading plans: 20th-century novels, 19th-century authors, philosophy, poetry. But I don’t read so that a teacher will approve of what I do, I don’t read to do a task well. The discipline of a reader is deactivated at some point during the day. It is not always possible to think that one is doing one’s homework. The anguish of reading should not be confused with the anxiety of reading. Did Montaigne read St. Augustine’s Confessions or not? One researcher says no. Another, a writer, says that without that reading, a book like the Essays would not have existed. When one matures, one easily discovers how easy it is to detect when someone is lying about what they have read. It’s a bit like music. If you didn’t like a certain genre in your youth, why should you be ashamed of your ignorance when, finding yourself in the midst of a group of scholars on, say, the history of rock, you can’t contribute a single interjection? You can’t do much with that information about someone else’s poor reading habits. They may have read things you haven’t read, they may have gained things you haven’t been able to gain. When you’re, say, fifty years old, you like to say that you read that book when you were twenty. It may be true. But the urge not to come across as a poor ignoramus when it comes to basic reading may be stronger, and so you get out of it that way. I’ve said it before: going to college profoundly changed my perception of life. I started reading, reading seriously, and that period has lasted until today. I haven’t stopped. I’ve had empty seasons, of insecurity and total fog, like those first months after leaving Cuba and arriving in Texas. A state of bewilderment coupled with revelation, discovery, and mistrust that fortunately passed very quickly with the birth of a child and my admission to doctoral studies at a university.
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Owning a library is to begin to show a fascination with the abyss. The library is what structures not only a thought, but the order/disorder of a life, the labyrinth in which we move.
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Is possession a narcissistic exercise? Without narcissism, there is not the slightest possibility of art, says Levrero. The whole is the true, says Hegel.
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There is always something unresolved in reading, even more so than in writing, but even more so in bookish possessions. The perpetual search, the desire for completeness.
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The advantage of the reader is that everything that is coming has already been read.
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Andrés Trapiello: You cannot read without enthusiasm, just as you cannot write without skepticism.
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One of Euclid’s postulates, the fifth, states that through a point outside a straight line, there passes one and only one parallel line. The library and the act of reading are corresponding in the sense that there will always be a book you will never come across.
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The library is the suspension of all writing and is what happens immediately after knowledge, never the other way around. One only reads from knowledge.
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The library is not collected or accumulated time, but a departure from time.
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Amidst so much “public space” (it is true that everything seems to belong to the public category), the private library resists fulfilling a role of access and participation for the community. Like those booksellers and second-hand booksellers who refused to sell their most valuable books.
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A library is the fruit of insatiable curiosity and also of an ambition that is difficult to curb.
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Not leaving notes in books is like passing through them like a ghost or a transparency. And even so, I wanted them to be neat.
Image: Martha Ma. Montejo, Raptis Rare Books (Palm Beach FL)
