EVEN AS A CHILD, I GREW accustomed to seeing the world divided into parts, according to the colored patches on my pivoting globe. I learned to say “earth” to mean the clump of dirt I picked up in my hand, and “Earth” to denote the vast clump of dirt, too big to be seen, that my teachers told me circles endlessly around the sun. Every time I move, clumps of earth mark my passage through life like the ticking of a clock, as if time (my time) could be measured in handfuls, each handful unique and distinguishable as part of the place where something has happened to me—where something, quite literally, has taken place. As a place marking time, the earth we tread on acquires, in our symbolic vocabularies, the values of birth, life, and death.
Atlases, maps, encyclopedias, dictionaries attempt to order and label everything we know about the earth and the sky. Our earliest books are Sumerian lists and catalogues, as if giving things names and placing them under various categories allowed us an understanding of them. When I was a child, the ordering of my books suggested to me curious associations by subject, size, language, author, color. All seemed valid upon my shelves and each order transformed the included books into something that I had not noticed before. Treasure Island had a place among my books about pirates, among my books with brown covers, among my middle-sized books, among my books written in English. I acknowledged all these labels for my Treasure Island, but what did they mean?
Several mythologies see earth as the stuff we are made of, modeled into God’s own image by his wizard hand and allotted a specific place and role; earth is also the source of our food and the container of our drink; in the end, earth is the home to which we return and the dust that we become. These categories all define it. A Zen parable which a quirky teacher had us read in high school tells of a disciple who asks his master what is life. The master picks up a handful of earth and lets it sift through his fingers. Then the disciple asks the master what is death. The master repeats the same gesture. The disciple asks what is the Buddha. Again, the master repeats his gesture. The disciple bows his head and thanks the master for his answers. “But those were not answers,” says the master. “Those were questions.”
The earth does not argue,
Is not pathetic, has no arrangements,
Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise,
Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures,
Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out,
Of all the powers, objects, states, it notifies, shuts none out.
—WALT WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass
Taking time to accustom themselves to the dismal stench that rises from the seventh circle, where the violent are punished, Virgil and Dante take refuge behind a large stone that announces itself as the tomb of Pope Anastasius, punished for his heretical views. Virgil profits from the wait to instruct Dante on the arrangement of the circles of Lower Hell in order to prepare him for the terrible regions that still lie ahead. Coming after the encounter with the heretics who tried to disarrange and confuse the divine laws, Virgil’s careful description of the ordered Underworld can be read as a powerful reminder that everything in the universe, as everything in the Commedia, has a carefully assigned and singular place. Against this rigorously tidy background all human dramas in the poem are played out, sometimes with detailed reference to the setting, other times with barely a mention of the contextual details. But because everything that occurs in the three realms of the afterlife has a reason and a logical justification (even if it isn’t a human logic or a reason that is humanly comprehensible) each punishment, purgation, and reward is strictly and immutably confined to a given place in a preestablished system, mirroring the perfect order of God’s mind. The words inscribed on the gate of Hell quoted earlier are valid for the whole of the Otherworld: “Divine Power made me, / Wisdom supreme and primal Love.”1 Hell, because it is God’s creation like the rest of universe, cannot be any less than perfect.
Virgil’s lesson in geography grounds the nightmarish journey in a landscape of dirt and stone with such precision that Galileo, as we have seen, would later feel able to calculate its measurements. Virgil gives his exposition in two parts: first describing the sections of Hell to come, then responding to Dante’s questions about the regions already visited.
After the circle of the heretics lie the circles that lodge the sinners guilty of malice, in which the intellect has a willing part. These damned souls are split into those guilty of perpetrating injustice unthinkingly and those who committed injustice by choice, a much more dreadful fault. The former, lodged in the seventh circle, are in turn divided into three: those who have been violent towards others, towards themselves, and towards God. Those guilty of perpetrating injustice through reason, punished in the next circle, include those guilty of fraud in its various guises. In the ninth and last circle are the traitors; at the very center is the arch-traitor, Lucifer. In answer to Dante’s questions, Virgil tells him that the sinners in the second to fifth circles—the lustful, the gluttonous, the avaricious and spendthrifts, and the wrathful—are guilty of the sin of incontinence, a sin (following Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics) considered less grievous than that of malice, and therefore outside the fiery walls of the City of Dis.2
Exactly halfway up Mount Purgatory, Virgil undertakes the same categorical exposition for Dante’s (and the reader’s) benefit. The source of the arrangement here is not Aristotle but Christian dogma concerning the nature of sins and virtues. Waiting for the sun to rise (since the laws of Purgatory forbid them to travel at night), and before visiting the souls who purge themselves of the sin of sloth, Virgil explains to Dante the cartography of Purgatory. Here, says Virgil, the ruling force is love, both natural and rational, love that moves not only the Creator but his creatures.
The natural is always without error,
but the other one can err through aiming wrongly,
or through too little or too much force.3
The categories of love are represented by the various sins purged on the mountain. Those who aim their love wrongly are the proud, the envious and the wrathful; those whose love lacks vigor are the slothful; those whose love inclines them too strongly towards earthly things are the avaricious, the gluttons, and the lustful. Each group has a strict place allotted in the ascent. The bureaucracy of Purgatory is very strict.
Paradise is somewhat different from the other two realms because, even if the Celestial Kingdom is partitioned, as we have seen earlier, into several heavens, each blessed soul, wherever it might be, is utterly blissful. As Piccarda tells Dante, after he asks her whether the souls desire a higher position in the grades of heaven:
Brother, our will is satisfied
by the quality of love that makes us long
only for what we have and thirst for nothing else.
Piccarda movingly concludes: “And in his will is our peace.” According to God’s will, the universe exists in a perfect and immutable order where everything, in Heaven as on Earth (and below it), has been assigned its proper place.4
We are tidy creatures. We distrust chaos. Though experience comes to us with no recognizable system, for no intelligible reason, with blind and carefree generosity, we believe despite all evidence to the contrary in law and order, and portray our gods as meticulous archivists and dogmatic librarians. Following what we believe to be the method of the universe, we put everything away into files and compartments; feverishly we arrange, we classify, we label. We know that what we call the world has no meaningful beginning and no understandable end, neither a discernible purpose nor a method in its madness. But we insist: it must make sense, it must signify something. So we divide space into regions and time into days, and again and again we are bewildered when space refuses to hold to the borders of our atlases and time overflows the dates of our history books. We collect objects and build houses for them in the hope that the walls will give the contents coherence and a meaning. We will not accept the inherent ambiguity of any object or collection that charms our attention by saying, like the voice in the burning bush, “I am that I am.” “All right,” we add, “but you are also a thornbush, Prunus spinosa,” and give it its place in the herbarium. We believe that location will help us understand events and their protagonists, and that all the chattel they take on their adventures and misadventures will be defined by the place we assign it. We trust maps.
Map of Dante’s Hell in Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi’s edition of the Commedia (Milan: Mondadori, 2007), vol. 1, pp. xlx–xlxi. (Used with permission.) Reading from top to bottom, left to right: (first section) Gate of Hell; The Plains of Acheron: Neutrals; Acheron River; INCONTINENCE/CIRCLES II–V: Circle I: Limbo; Circle II: The Lustful; Circle III: Gluttons; Circle IV: Spenders and Hoarders; Circle V: The Wrathful and Sullen; The Walls of the City of Dis; Circle VI: Heretics; (second section) VIOLENCE/CIRCLE VII: Cornice I: Violent Toward Others, Toward People: Tyrants and Murderers, Toward Things: Robbers and Plunderers; Cornice II: Violent Toward Self, Toward People: Suicides, Toward Things: Squanderers; Cornice III: Violent Toward God, Toward People: Blasphemers, Toward Things: Sodomites and Usurers; (third and fourth sections) FRAUD (third section) AGAINST THE UNTRUSTWORTHY (FRAUDS)/MALEBOLGE: CIRCLE VIII: 1. Flatterers; 2. Seducers; 3. Simoniacs; 4. Diviners; 5. Barrators; 6. Hypocrites; 7. Thieves; 8. False Counselors; 9. Schismatics; 10. Falsifiers; (fourth section) AGAINST THOSE WHO BETRAY TRUST (TRAITORS)/THE LAKE OF ICE: CIRCLE IX: Caina: Traitors to Kin; Antenora: Traitors to Country; Ptolemea: Traitors to Guests; Judecca: Traitors to Benfactors; Lucifer. Right-hand schema: Paradise; Earthly Paradise; Purgatory; EARTH: Hemisphere of Water, Hemisphere of Emerged Land, Hell, Jerusalem. (Translation by Will Schutt.)
Map of Dante’s Purgatory in Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi’s edition of the Commedia (Milan: Mondadori, 2007), vol. 2, pp. xlviii–xlix. (Used with permission.) Reading from top to bottom, left to right: Earthly Paradise; (first section) EXCESSIVE LOVE OF WORLDLY GOODS: Cornice VII: Lust; Cornice VI: Gluttony; Cornice V: Avarice; (second section) DEFECTIVE LOVE: Cornice IV: Sloth; (third section) MISDIRECTED LOVE: Cornice III: Wrath; Cornice II: Envy; Cornice I: Pride; Gate of Purgatory; (fourth section) ANTE-PURGATORY (SOULS WHO REPENTED AT THE FINAL HOUR): Negligent Rulers; Those Who Died by Violence; The Lethargic; Excommunicates; Ocean. Right-hand schema: Paradise; Earthly Paradise; Purgatory; EARTH: Hemisphere of Water, Hemisphere of Emerged Land, Hell, Jerusalem. (Translation by Will Schutt.)
Map of Dante’s Heaven in Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi’s edition of the Commedia (Milan: Mondadori, 2007), vol. 3, pp. lviii–lix. (Used with permission.) Reading from top to bottom, left to right: God; Believers in Christ; Mary/Rose of the Blessed; Believers in Christ; (upper rings) HEAVEN/EMPYREAN: IX (Heaven) Crystalline Heaven or Primum Mobile (Empyrean) Vision of the Nine Angelic Choirs; VIII (Heaven) Starry Heaven or Fixed Stars (Empyrean) Vision of the Church Triumphant; VII (Heaven) Heaven of Saturn (Empyrean) Contemplative Souls; VI (Heaven) Heaven of Jupiter (Empyrean) Just Souls; V (Heaven) Heaven of Mars (Empyrean) Souls Who Fought for the Faith; IV (Heaven) Heaven of Sun (Empyrean) Wise Souls; III (Heaven) Heaven of Venus (Empyrean) Souls of Lovers; II (Heaven) Heaven of Mercury (Empyrean) Souls Who Worked for Glory; I (Heaven) Heaven of Moon (Empyrean) Souls Who Failed to Keep Their Vows; (center schema) CIRCLE OF FIRE; Earthly Paradise; Purgatory; AIR/AIR; EARTH: Hemisphere of Water, Lucifer, Hemisphere of Emerged Land, Hell, Jerusalem; (lower rings) Angels; Archangels; Principalities; Powers; Virtues; Dominions; Thrones; Cherubim; Seraphim. (Translation by Will Schutt.)
Vladimir Nabokov, prior to delivering his Harvard lectures on the novel, used to prepare charts of the locations in which the novels he taught took place, just like the ones found in the “scene of the crime” plans that used to accompany detective novels in the pocket editions of the forties and fifties: a map of Great Britain with the sites of Bleak House, the layout of Sotherton Court in Mansfield Park, the Samsa family’s flat in The Metamorphosis, Leopold Bloom’s path through Dublin in Ulysses.5 Nabokov understood the inextricable relationship between a setting and its narrative (a relationship that is of the essence in the Commedia).
A museum, an archive, a library are each a species of map, a place of defining categories, an organized realm of predetermined sequences. Even an institution that houses an apparently heterogeneous collection of objects, assembled, it would seem, without a clear purpose, becomes identified by a label that is not that of any of its several pieces: the name of their collector, for instance, or the circumstances of their assembly, or the overall category within which the objects are inscribed.
The first university museum—the first museum built for the purpose of facilitating study of a specific group of objects—was the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, founded in 1683. At its core was a collection of strange and wonderful things amassed by two seventeenth-century botanists and gardeners, father and son, both called John Tradescant, and sent to Oxford by barge from London. Several of these treasures are listed in the museum’s earliest catalogue:
• A Babylonian Vest.
• Diverse sorts of Egges from Turkic; one given for a Dragons egge.
• Easter Egges of the Patriarchs of Jerusalem.
• Two feathers of the Phoenix tayle.
• The claw of the bird Rock: who, as Authors report, is able to trusse an Elephant.
• Dodar, from the island Mauritius; it is not able to fly being so big.
• Hares head, with rough horns three inches long.
• Toad fish, and one with prickles.
• Divers things cut on Plum-stones.
• A Brazen-balle to warme the Nunnes hands.6
A phoenix’s feather and a nun’s warming-ball, a toad fish and hare’s horned head have little in common: what holds them together is the fascination these objects produced, three centuries ago, in the minds and hearts of the two Tradescants. Whether these objects represented the Tradescants’ greed or curiosity, whether they were real or fabulous, their vision of the world or a reflection of the dark map of their souls, those who visited the Ashmolean in the late seventeenth century would enter a space ordered, so to speak, by the Tradescants’ ruling passion. Private imagination can lend the world coherence and a semblance of order.
And yet no order, as we know, however coherent, is ever impartial. Any categorical system imposed on objects or souls or ideas must be suspect since, of necessity, it contaminates with meaning those very ideas, people, objects. The Babylonian vest and the Easter eggs of the Ashmolean formulate a seventeenth-century notion of private property; the sinners in Hell and the blessed in Heaven enact their singular dramas, collectively representing both a thirteenth-century Christian cosmogony and Dante’s intimate vision of the world. The Commedia is in this sense an imaginary universal museum, a stage for the performance of unconscious fears and desires, a library of everything that was one poet’s passion and vision, arranged and displayed for our enlightenment.
In the Middle Ages such eclectic collections were amassed by the church and the nobility, but the habit of exposing one’s private passions to public view can be traced, in Europe, to the late fifteenth century. At a time when heads of state had begun to amass some of the world’s greatest collections of art in Vienna, the Vatican, Spain’s El Escorial, Florence, and Versailles, smaller, more personal collections were also being formed by private individuals. One such collection was that of Isabella d’Este, wife of the marquis of Mantua, who, rather than purchasing art for devotional reasons or to furnish a house, began collecting works of art for the sake of the objects themselves. Up to that time, the wealthy collected artwork mainly to lend a domestic space beauty or prestige. Isabella reversed the process and set aside a room that would instead provide a frame to the objects she had collected. In her camerino, or “small chamber” (which was to become famous in the history of art as one of the earliest private museums), Isabella exhibited “paintings with a story” by the best contemporary artists. She had a good eye: she instructed her agents to approach Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Leonardo, Perugino, Giorgione, Raphael, and Michelangelo in order to obtain artwork for her camerino. Several of these artists complied.7
A century later the collecting passion took over the houses not only of aristocrats like Isabella but also of the rich bourgeoisie, and owning a private collection became an indication of social status, financial or scholarly. What Francis Bacon called “a model of the universal nature made private” could be seen in the parlors of many lawyers and physicians. The French word cabinet, referring to a piece of furniture with lockable drawers or a small wood-paneled room like the camerino, became commonplace in wealthy homes. In England, the cabinet was called a closet, from the Latin clausum, or “closed,” indicating the private nature of the space. In the rest of Europe, the private collection of heterogeneous objects came to be known as a cabinet de curiosités or Wunderkammer. Some of the most famous, assembled during the following centuries, were those of Rudolph II in Prague, Ferdinand II in Ambras Castle at Innsbruck, Ole Worm in Copenhagen, Peter the Great in Saint Petersburg, Gustaf Adolphus in Stockholm, and the architect Sir Hans Sloane in London. Fostered by men like these, curiosity was officially given its place in the household.8
Sometimes, when cash was lacking, curiosity collectors resorted to ingenious devices. In 1620, the scholar Cassiano dal Pozzo assembled in his house in Rome not the original works of art, the authentic handcrafted models of famous buildings, the natural-history specimens sought after by his wealthier peers, but drawings commissioned from professional draftsmen of all kinds of strange objects, creatures, and antiquities. He called this his Paper Museum. Here again, as in Isabella’s camerino and in the Tradescants’ collection, the ruling design, the imposed order, was personal, a Gestalt created by one person’s private history—with an added characteristic: the objects themselves were no longer required to be the real thing. These could now be replaced by their imagined representations. And since these reproductions were much cheaper and easier to come by than the originals, the Paper Museum allowed even those of moderate means to become collectors. Borrowing the notion of surrogate reality from literature, where the representation of an experience is equivalent to the experience itself, the Paper Museum enabled the collector to possess a shadow model of the universe under his or her roof. Not everyone approved, echoing the criticism of the Neoplatonist scholar Marsilio Ficino, who in the fifteenth century spoke of “those who in their wretchedness prefer the shadows of things to things themselves.”9
The idea of collecting shadows is very ancient. The Ptolemaic kings, conscious of the impossibility of gathering the whole of the known world within the borders of Egypt, conceived the idea of collecting in Alexandria, within the walls of one building, every representation of whatever knowledge of the world they could lay their hands on, and so sent out orders to bring to their universal library every scroll or tablet that could be found, acquired, copied, or stolen. Every ship docking at the port of Alexandria had to give up any book it carried so a copy could be made, after which the original (or sometimes the copy) would be returned to its owner. It is surmised that at the height of its fame the Library of Alexandria held a collection of over half a million scrolls.10
Setting up an ordered space for displaying information is always a dangerous enterprise, since, as in the case of any scaffolding or frame, the arrangement, however neutral its intention, always affects the contents. An all-encompassing poem, read as religious allegory, fantastical adventure, or autobiographical pilgrimage, much as a universal library of incised, handwritten, printed, or electronic texts, translates each of the elements collected under its roof into the language of the framework. No structure is innocent of meaning.
A spiritual heir of the Alexandrian Ptolemies was an extraordinary man called Paul Otlet, born in Brussels on 23 August 1868 to a family of financiers and city planners. As a child, Otlet showed a remarkable interest in ordering things: his toys, his books, his pets. His favorite game, in which his younger brother took part, was bookkeeping, listing debits and credits in neat columns, and filing timetables and catalogues. He also liked drawing plots for the plants in the garden and building rows of pens for the barnyard animals. Later, when the family moved for a time to a small Mediterranean island off the French coast, Otlet began a collection of bits and pieces—shells, minerals, fossils, Roman coins, animal skulls—with which he built his own cabinet de curiosités. At the age of fifteen, he founded with several school friends the Private Society of Collectors and edited a magazine for its members severely titled La Science. About the same time, Otlet discovered in his father’s library the Encyclopédie Larousse, “a book,” he later said, “that explains everything and gives all the answers.”11 And yet the many-volumed Larousse was for the ambitious young man too modest in its scope, and Otlet began a project that would see the light several decades later: the preparation of a universal encyclopedia that would include not merely answers and explanations but the totality of human questioning.
In 1892, the young Otlet met Henri Lafontaine, who was to receive in 1913 the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts toward an international peace movement. The two men became inseparable, and like Bouvard and Pécuchet, Flaubert’s endless seekers of information, Otlet and Lafontaine would together scour libraries and archives to compile an enormous collection of bibliographical resources in every field of knowledge. Inspired by the decimal system of library classification invented by the American Melvin Dewey in 1876, Otlet and Lafontaine decided to use Dewey’s system on a worldwide bibliographical scale, and wrote to Dewey for permission. The result was the creation of the Office international de Bibliographie in 1895, centered in Brussels but with correspondents in many countries. In the first few years of the institute’s existence, an army of young female employees went through the catalogues of libraries and archives, transcribing the data onto 7.5 × 12.5–centimeter index cards at an approximate rate of two thousand cards a day. In 1912, the number of cards of the Office reached more than ten million; an additional hundred thousand iconographical documents included photographic images, as well as transparencies, film stills, and movie reels.
Otlet believed that cinema, together with the recently invented (but not yet made public) television, was the way in which information would be transmitted in the future. To foster this idea, he developed a revolutionary machine (similar to microfilm) that copied books photographically and projected the pages onto a screen. He called his invention a bibliophote, or “projected book,” and he imagined the possibility of spoken books, of books transmitted from a distance, and of books made visible in three dimensions—fifty years before the invention of the hologram—that would all be available to private citizens in their own homes, like today’s Internet. Otlet called these gadgets “substitutes for the book.”12
To visualize the extent to which Dewey’s decimal system could be put to use in the vast maze of documentation, Otlet drew a chart comparing Dewey’s system to a sun whose rays spread and multiply as they retreat from the center, embracing every branch of human knowledge. The diagram uncannily resembles Dante’s final vision of three luminous circles in one, spreading their combined light throughout the universe, containing everything and being everything.
Oh light eternal, that in yourself abide,
only yourself understands, and, self-understood
and self-understanding, loves yourself and laughs!13
Otlet was always a keen collector, and the universal archive he imagined would not neglect anything. Like the Jews who preserved in the Cairo Geniza every scrap of paper in case it might contain, unbeknownst, the name of God, Otlet kept everything.14 A small example: before leaving on his honeymoon in 1890, the young Otlet and his bride went to weigh themselves in the Grands Magasins du Louvre in Paris. The tickets, indicating that Otlet weighed 70 kilos and his wife 55, were carefully preserved by Otlet in cellophane envelopes and can been seen today in a cardboard box containing his assorted cards and papers. “You see the essential in what is accessory,” a friend remarked to Otlet, a useful way of explaining Otlet’s omnivorous curiosity.15
Collecting led to cataloguing and classifying. Otlet’s grandson Jean recalled that one day, as they were strolling together on the beach, they came upon a number of jellyfish washed up on the sand. Otlet stopped, gathered the jellyfish into a pyramid, took out a blank card from the pocket of his vest, and wrote the creature’s classification according to the Office international de Bibliographie: “5933.” The number 5 indicated the category of general sciences, followed by 9, it was narrowed down to zoology, with a 3 added, to coelenterates, and with another 3, to jellyfish, 5933. Then he fixed the card to the top of the gelatinous compilation, and they continued their stroll.16
Otlet’s chart depicting the division of all branches of knowledge, from Françoise Levie, L’Homme qui voulait classer le monde: Paul Otlet et le Mundaneum (Bruxelles: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2006). (Illustration © Collections Mundaneum [Belgium])
Otlet’s organizational passion led him to support the utopian project of a Norwegian architect, Hendrik Andersen, for an ideal city that was to serve as the World Centre for Peace and Harmony. Several sites were suggested: Tervuren in Flanders, Fiumicino near Rome, Constantinople, Paris, Berlin, and somewhere in New Jersey. The ambitious dream provoked much skepticism among politicians as well as among intellectuals. Henry James, who was a good friend of Andersen and admired the Norwegian’s sculptures, abhorred the idea of such an elephantine plan. In a letter addressed to Andersen, James called his friend a megalomaniac. “How can I throw myself on your side,” he wrote, “to the extent of employing to back you a single letter of the Alphabet when you break to me anything so fantastic or out of relation to any reality of any kind in all the weary world???” James should not have been surprised: as a novelist, he had shown how deeply he understood the megalomaniac character. In 1897 his Spoils of Poynton had dissected Mrs. Gereth’s obsession with the bric-à-brac collected over the years in her splendid house, Poynton. “To have created such a place,” James had written, “was to have had dignity enough; when there was a question of defending it the fiercest attitude was the right one.” The Ideal City of Andersen, like the mountains of data collected by Otlet in the Office, were, like Poynton for Mrs. Gereth, a totality of things too precious to admit reproof of any kind. “There are things in the house that we almost starved for!” says Mrs. Gereth. “They were our religion, they were our life, they were us!” As James made clear, these “‘things’ were of course the sum of the world; only, for Mrs. Gereth, the sum of the world was rare French furniture and oriental china. She could at a stretch imagine people’s not having, but she couldn’t imagine their not wanting and not missing.”17 Andersen, like Otlet, was of a similar mind. James’s criticism went unheeded.
Otlet became obsessed with the project, which he now named his Mundaneum, and which, in his vision, would comprise a museum, a library, a large auditorium, and a separate building devoted to scientific research. He proposed that the Mundaneum be built in Geneva under the motto “Classification of everything, by all and for all.” The most famous architect of the time, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Le Corbusier, supported the project and drew up an audacious plan for Otlet’s city; Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-American millionaire, offered to help finance it. But in October 1929, the crash of Wall Street put an end to all hopes for American financial support, and Otlet’s utopian project was all but forgotten.18
Yet the basic concept of the Mundaneum, of various collections “conceived as parts of one universal body of documentation, as an encyclopedic survey of human knowledge, as an enormous intellectual warehouse of books, documents, catalogues and scientific objects,” survived immutable in their catalogued sequences, stowed away in the Palais du Cinquantenaire in Brussels, until 1940.19 On 10 May of that year, the German army invaded Belgium, and Otlet and his wife were forced to abandon their precious collection and seek refuge in France. Desperate to save his classified universe, Otlet wrote pleading letters to Marshall Pétain, to President Roosevelt, even to Hitler. But his efforts proved useless. The Palais that lodged his collection was dismantled, the furniture he lovingly designed was transferred to the Palais de Justice, and the books and documents put away in boxes. When Otlet returned home after the liberation of Brussels, on 4 September 1944, he discovered that the card indexes and iconographic files had been replaced by an exhibition of “new art” from the Third Reich, the Nazis had destroyed sixty tons of periodicals catalogued in the institute, and two hundred thousand volumes of the carefully assembled library had disappeared. Paul Otlet died, heart-broken, in 1944.
After his death, the remains of his colossal project were stored in Brussels’s insalubrious Institute d’Anatomie. After a few more displacements, in 1992 the dismembered collection found at last a secure place in a renovated 1930s department store in the Belgian city of Mons, where, after being painstakingly reorganized, the new Mundaneum opened its doors in 1996.20
Perhaps an explanation for Otlet’s obsession can be found in a diary entry of 1916. There Otlet says that after an illness suffered in his adolescence (a mixture, according to him, of scarlet fever, diphtheria, meningitis, and typhus), he lost his textual memory and could no longer learn by heart poems or sections of prose. To remedy this, he explains, “I learned to correct my memory through reason.”21 Unable to memorize facts and figures by himself, Otlet perhaps imagined his Office international de Bibliographie or Mundaneum as a sort of surrogate memory that could be constructed through index cards, images, books, and other documents. It is certain that Otlet loved the world and longed to know everything about the things of the world, and yet, like the sinners described by Virgil, he erred by directing his love towards a mistaken goal, or with too much vigor. It is to be hoped that the God in whom he believed found it in his heart to forgive a fellow cataloguer.
In 1975, Jorge Luis Borges, perhaps inspired by the character of Otlet, wrote a long story called “The Congress” in which a man tries to compile an encyclopedia from which nothing on earth should be excluded.22 This virtual version of the world proves in the end to be impossible or, as the narrator concludes, useless, since the world, to our joy and sorrow, already exists. In the last pages, the ambitious encyclopedist takes his fellow researchers on a horse-and-buggy ride through Buenos Aires, but the city they now see, with its houses, trees, and people, is not alien and individual: it is the researchers’ own creation, the one they had bravely attempted and which now, suddenly and full of wonder, they realize has always been there.
