THE DAY I LEFT MY LIBRARY IN FRANCE FOR THE LAST TIME, I felt desperately unhappy, and waves of remembered lines about revenge and rage and despair came “hammering in my head” as if the library were opening its books to me in a final friendly gesture. A quote from Through the Looking-Glass came to my rescue. To console Alice, who is feeling miserable in the alien chessboard kingdom, the White Queen instructs her, “Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you’ve come to-day. Consider what o’clock it is. Consider anything, only don’t cry.” I considered many things: the peaceful place in which the library stood, the time it had taken to build it, the books I acquired when I was there. I asked myself, What were the circumstances that led me to set up the collection about to be stashed away in numbered boxes? What quirk made me cluster these volumes into something like the colored countries on my globe? What brought on these associations that seemed to owe their meaning to faded emotions and a logic whose rules I can now no longer remember? And does my present self reflect that distant haunting? Because if every library is autobiographical, its packing up seems to have something of a self-obituary. Perhaps these questions are the true subject of this elegy.
There are certain readers for whom books exist in the moment of reading them, and later as memories of the read pages, but who feel that the physical incarnations of books are dispensable. Borges, for instance, was one of these. Those who never visited Borges’s modest flat imagined his library to be as vast as that of Babel. In fact, Borges kept only a few hundred books, and even these he used to give away as gifts to visitors. Occasionally, a certain volume had sentimental or superstitious value for him, but by and large what mattered to him were a few recalled lines, not the material object in which he had found them. For me, it has always been otherwise.
Coventry Patmore, in a poem I learned by heart as a child, says that after having struck his young son for disobeying him, he went that night into the boy’s bedroom and saw that
on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-vein’d stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
Comfort is of the essence. The comforting objects on my own night table are (have always been) books, and my library was itself a place of comfort and quiet reassurance. It may be that books have this reassuring quality because we don’t really possess them: books possess us. Julio Cortázar, warning against accepting the gift of a watch, tells his readers: “When they give you a watch, they give you the fear of losing it, of having it stolen, of letting it drop on the floor and breaking. They give you its brand and the assurance that it’s a better brand than other brands, they give you the need to compare your watch with other watches. They don’t give you a watch as a gift, it is you who are the gift, it is you who are being given for the birthday of the watch.” Something of the sort can be said about my books.
Perhaps the books we choose determine our perdition or salvation in the eyes of whimsical gods. In her “Report on Heaven and Hell,” Silvina Ocampo concluded: “The laws of heaven and hell are versatile. Whether you go to one place or the other depends on a tiny detail. I know people who, because of a broken key or a wicker cage have gone to hell, and others who because of a newspaper page or a cup of milk, to heaven.” My salvation might depend on having read a certain book by Richard Outram, by William Saroyan, by Jan Morris, by Olga Sedakova.
The books in my library promised me comfort, and also the possibility of enlightening conversations. They granted me, every time I took one in my hands, the memory of friendships that required no introductions, no conventional politeness, no pretense or concealed emotion. I knew, in that familiar space between the covers, that one evening I’d pull down a volume of Dr. Johnson or Voltaire I had never opened, and I would discover a line that had been waiting for me for centuries. I was certain, without having to retrace my way through it, that Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday or a volume of Cesare Pavese’s poems would be exactly what I required to put into words what I was feeling on any given morning. Books have always spoken for me, and have taught me many things long before these things came materially into my life, and the physical volumes have been for me something very much like breathing creatures that share my bed and board. This intimacy, this trust, began early on among readers.
My library, however newly built, was in essence an ancient place: its books are the earliest protagonists of our literature. The Epic of Gilgamesh begins not with the adventurous king but with a box at the top of a tower that contains the lapis-lazuli book in which the poem is written, and in the first pages of the Mahabharata the bard Ugrashravas speaks of the volumes of the sacred Vedas and of the tales in the Bharata that will enlighten his listeners. In early copies of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the souls are seen carrying that same book on their journey to the Otherworld, one of the first mise en abymes in history. From those distant days on, books have defined the characters who read them or possess them, the book in the book becoming a mirror of the protagonist who is a mirror of the reader, like the play within the play that Hamlet sets up to trap his murderous uncle, and that also, implicitly, depicts the Prince himself.
The most famous and dearest of these readers (for me at least) is Alonso Quijano, the old man who becomes Don Quixote through his reading. The village priest and the barber, to cure him of what they perceive as madness, throw most of the old man’s books into the fire and imprison the survivors behind a brick wall to make it appear as if the library had never existed. When after two days of convalescing, Don Quixote leaves his bed and goes to seek the comfort of his books, he doesn’t find them. He is told that a wizard arrived one night on a cloud and made the books and the room they were in vanish in a puff of smoke. Cervantes doesn’t tell us what Alonso Quijano feels when he hears this; he simply says that the old man remained for a full fortnight at home, without speaking a word about pursuing his knightly quest. Without his library, Alonso Quijano is no longer who he was. But then, in conversation with the barber and the priest, and remembering the books that had taught him of the world’s need for the ethics of chivalry, his imaginative strength comes back to him. He leaves his house, recruits a neighboring peasant, Sancho Panza, as his squire, and sets off on new adventures in which, though he will continue to see the world through the printed word of stories, he no longer requires them in a material sense. Having lost his books as objects, Don Quixote rebuilds his library in his mind and finds in the remembered pages the source for renewed strength. For the rest of the novel Don Quixote will no longer read a book, any book, even that which tells of his own adventures when he and Sancho discover their chronicle in print in a press of Barcelona, or those the innkeeper shows him, because now Don Quixote has attained the state of perfect readership, knowing his books by heart in the strictest sense of the word.
I’ve read Don Quixote many times since my high school days, and I’ve always felt, especially in the chapter in which Quijano discovers his loss, a deep sympathy for the deceived old man. Now, having lost my own library, I think I can better understand what he went through and why he set off once again into the world. Loss helps you remember, and loss of a library helps you remember who you truly are.
Perhaps the greatest loss of a library (but the loss of any library is incommensurable) took place on a day that our histories mysteriously have not recorded. We don’t know exactly when the library that came to stand as the model for all libraries, the Library of Alexandria, came to an end. In fact, we know nothing, or almost nothing, of the great library except its fame. Kingsley’s description is probably closer to an Alma-Tadema painting of his own time than to the library contemporary travelers thought too well known to bother describing. We don’t have a single account of how it functioned, what it looked like, how big it was, who were the readers who studied there. We can surmise some of these things from different sources, but all we have are stories (probably true) about its creation and stories (probably false) about its end.
The Library of Alexandria, as far as we can tell, was founded in the third century B.C.E. by Ptolemy I, a Macedonian general who had served under Alexander the Great, who in turn had been tutored by Aristotle. Legend has it that the library was built around the core of books left by Aristotle to one of his students, Demetrius of Phaleron, and housed in the Mouseion, the house of the Muses, daughters of the goddess Memory. To feed the voracious enterprise, the Ptolemaic kings ordered that every book in their realm be bought or copied and transported to the library, which, at the height of its fame, is said to have held close to half a million scrolls. Ships sailing into Alexandria were searched for books they might be carrying. If any were found, they were confiscated by the port authorities, copied, and then returned, though at times the copies, not the originals, were given back to their owners.
For at least three centuries, the Library of Alexandria held under its roof most of the Mediterranean world’s memory. Its end came under circumstances as uncertain as those of its existence. Writing almost a century after the surmised events, Plutarch tells us that the library was consumed in a fire started by Julius Caesar’s troops in 48 B.C.E. during the siege of Alexandria, a story that today appears doubtful to most scholars, who believe that the fire destroyed only the stores near the port, which held the overflow of books. Perhaps the appeal of this account, many times repeated, is the schadenfreude of knowing that the presumptuous library met its end in a fire as fierce as its ambition.
Whatever the cause, after the destruction, readers in Alexandria used a “daughter library” housed in the Serapeum, a temple erected in another part of the city, and this too was accorded a tragic end. According to the fifth-century historian Socrates of Constantinople, in 391 the Coptic pope Theophilus ordered that the Serapeum be torn down. It was a time of endings. That same year, Emperor Theodosius I banned pagan rituals and decreed Christianity as the state religion, closed all non-Christian schools of philosophy, banned all pagan places of worship, and extinguished the sacred fire in the Temple of Vesta in Rome.
One of the first scholars to work in the library was Callimachus, a Greek poet and critic. He was wonderfully prolific. The tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda credits him with over 800 books of which only 6 hymns and 64 epigrams survive. His punctilious erudition earned him a reputation for elitism and pedantry. Devoted to the library and its ambition, Callimachus compiled a 120-volume catalogue of “All Those Books Preeminent in Literature.” The Pinakes, as the catalogue was known, became a sort of annotated canon of the most important writings (according to Callimachus’s learned opinion) in the almost incommensurable collection. The Pinakes is now lost to us, as are most of the books and authors it was supposed to make live forever.
Callimachus believed that reading grants books and their authors life throughout eternity. In a poem dedicated to Heraclitus, he makes this thought explicit:
Long ago you turned to ashes, my Halicarnassian friend,
but your poems, your nightingales, live on.
Hades clutches all things yet can’t touch these.
Perhaps. A few books survive the destruction of a library, and a few authors cling to the raft of their surviving books. But others come to their end with the edifice that contained them. My Latin teacher would say, “We must be grateful that we don’t know what the great books were that perished in Alexandria, because if we knew what they were, we’d be inconsolable.”
We know, however, of a handful. Almost certainly among those lost was Homer’s comic epic the Margites, which for Aristotle was the predecessor of all comedies, “as the Iliad and the Odyssey are of our tragedies.” The second book of Aristotle’s Poetics (which provides a motive for the murderer in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose) disappeared in the library’s wake. Also gone are most of the works by the major Greek dramatists. According to ancient sources, the library held 90 plays by Euripides, 70 (some say 90) by Aeschylus, and 123 by Sophocles. Of this vast collection, other than scattered fragments, only 18 plays by Euripides, 7 by Aeschylus, and 7 by Sophocles have come down to us in their entirety.
Callimachus died in 240 B.C.E., the year when another librarian of Alexandria, Eratosthenes, who was said to have founded the science of geography, calculated the circumference of the earth with a 2 percent error. During his time as chief librarian, Eratosthenes succeeded in obtaining for the library the official Athenian copies (the closest thing to the originals) of the works of the three greatest Greek dramatists: Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides. He managed to have the king of Alexandria agree to pledge the equivalent in today’s currency of four million dollars as a guarantee against the precious manuscripts. However, once the scrolls arrived in Alexandria, Eratosthenes had the king forfeit the deposit, made copies of the manuscripts, and returned the copies to Athens. The Athenians, having both the texts and the money, were deemed satisfied.
Sometimes miracles occur. A few years ago, a young French scholar rooting about in the National Library of Athens found what he thought was (and that proved to be) a long-lost letter by Galen, the second-century Greek physician. Galen had collected a valuable library of medical manuscripts, and also works by Aristotle, Plato, and others, which he had carefully annotated in his own hand. Because the collection seemed to him too precious to leave unguarded in his house in Rome, Galen placed it in a storehouse near the port of Ostia, judged extremely secure because government guards were posted at its gate to ensure the safety of the grain silos. However, a fire broke out one night, reducing to ashes both the grain and Galen’s books. A friend wrote to Galen commiserating on his loss, and the physician answered him in a letter (unearthed by the French scholar) in which he stoically refuses to mourn his vanished library and instead tells his friend, in great detail, about his burnt books and how he had read and annotated them.