Beyond the national library of any nation lies a library greater than all, because it contains each and every one of them: an inconceivably vast and ideal library of all the books ever written, and of those that exist only as possibilities, as volumes still to come. This colossal accumulation of libraries overshadows any single collection of books and yet is implied in every one of their volumes. My edition of the Odyssey, “translated into English prose by T.E. Shaw” (better known as Lawrence of Arabia), echoes back to Alexandria and to the rigorous commentaries of Aristarchus, as well as forward to the generous library of Odysseys assembled by George Steiner in Geneva, and to the various pocket editions of Homer an anonymous reader in Montevideo sent to help rebuild the Library of Sarajevo. Each of these readers reads a different Odyssey, and their readings extend the adventures of Ulysses well beyond the Fortunate Isles, into infinity.
For me, among all of Ulysses’ stories none is as moving as his homecoming. The Sirens, the Cyclops, the sorceress and her spells are prodigious wonders, but the old man who weeps at the sight of the remembered shore and the dog who dies of a broken heart at the feet of his remembered master seem truer and more compelling than the marvels. Nine-tenths of the poem consist of surprise; the end is recognition.
What is this homecoming? It can be argued that we perceive the world in one of two ways—as a foreign land or as home—and that our libraries reflect both these opposing views. As we wander among our books, picking at random a volume from the shelves and leafing through it, the pages either astound us by their difference from our own experience or comfort us with their similitude. The greed of Agamemnon or the meekness of Kim’s Lama are to me utterly foreign; Alice’s bewilderment or Sinbad’s curiosity reflect again and again my own emotions. Every reader is either a pausing wanderer or a traveller returned.
It’s late at night. It’s raining heavily. I can’t sleep. I wander into my library, take a book off its shelf and read. In a faraway castle of broken walls, where the shadows were many and a cold wind breathed through the cracks of the battlements and casements, there lived a count of many years and great renown. His knowledge of the world came mainly from books, and he was certain of his place in history. This aristocratic man claimed the right to be proud because
in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship. Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which their Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of Europe, aye, and of Asia and Africa, too, till the peoples thought that the were-wolves themselves had come…. When was redeemed that great shame of my nation, the shame of Cassova [Kosovo], when the flags of the Wallach and the Magyar went down beneath the Crescent; who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground! This was a Dracula indeed!342
A seventeenth-century portrait of Vlad Dracul or Vladislaus Dracula, recently discovered in the Würtenberg State Library, Germany.
Count Dracula’s seat is in Transylvania. This is his umbilicus mundi, the navel of his world, the landscape that feeds his imagination, if not his body, since as time goes by it becomes difficult for him to find fresh blood in his native mountains, and he is forced to seek material nourishment abroad. “I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London,” says the count, “to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.”343 But wherever Dracula travels, he cannot be wholly parted from his home. The books on his dusty shelves chronicle his ancient story; all other libraries hold no interest for him. His castle with its ancestral library is his only real home, and he must always have with him a boxful (or coffinful) of the native earth in which he is so deeply rooted. Like Antaeus, he must touch his mother earth or die.
I put Bram Stoker’s novel away and reach for a second book, a few shelves above it. It tells the story of another traveller, one whose monstrous features the book hints at but never quite reflects. Like Count Dracula, this wanderer is also a lonely gentleman resolved that no one shall be his master, but unlike the count, he has no illusions about his aristocracy. He has no home, no roots, no ancestry. “I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property,”344 he tells us. He moves through the world like an exile from nowhere; he is a citizen of the cosmos because he is a citizen of no place. “I am content to suffer alone, while my sufferings shall endure,”345 he says in resignation. He teaches himself through books, collecting in his memory a curious and eclectic library. His first readings are vicarious; he listens to a family of peasants read out loud, somewhat implausibly, a philosophical meditation on universal history, C.-F. Volney’s Ruins of Empires. “Through this work,” he explains, “I obtained a cursory knowledge of history, and a view of the several empires at present existing in the world; it gave me an insight into the manners, governments, and religions of the different nations of the earth.” He wonders how human beings can be “at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base?” For this he has no answer, but even though he feels he is “not even of the same nature as man,”346 he nevertheless loves humankind and wishes to belong to the human realm. A lost suitcase full of clothes and books provides him with a few other readings: Milton’s Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives and Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. From Werther he learns “despondency and gloom,” from Plutarch “high thoughts.” But Paradise Lost moves him with a sense of wonder. “As I read,” he says, “I applied much personally to my own feelings and condition. I found myself similar, yet at the same time strangely unlike the beings concerning whom I read, and to whose conversation I was a listener. I sympathized with, and partly understood them, but I was unformed in mind; I was dependent on none, and related to none.”347 In spite of finding glimmers of his own story in the story of the fallen Adam, this bewildered reader finds that, however much he reads, human libraries do not account for him. Notwithstanding his eagerness to be part of the universal audience, this citizen of the world will be hounded from the world, will be scorned as a foreigner in every sense, as a creature beyond the pale of every society. Miserable, feared and hated, he will cause the death of his own maker, and finally Dr. Frankenstein’s monster will lose himself forever in the ice of the North Pole, inside the frozen blank page known as Canada, the dumping ground of so many of the world’s fantasies.
Frankenstein’s monster is both the utter foreigner and the perfect world citizen; he is alien in every way, a horror to look upon, and yet made up of all manner of human pieces. Learning like a child for the first time the nature of the world and of himself, he is the archetypal lector virgo, the curious being willing to be taught by the open page, a visitor to the library of the world carrying no prejudices or experience to colour his reading. When the monster enters the blind hermit’s cottage, he pronounces these words: “Pardon the intrusion. … I am a traveller in want of a little rest.” A traveller for whom there are no borders, no nationalities, no limitations of space, because he belongs nowhere, the monster must even excuse himself for entering a world into which he has not willingly come, promoted from darkness, in the words of Milton’s Adam.348 I find the phrase “Pardon the intrusion” unbearably moving.
For Frankenstein’s monster, the world as described in books is monothematic; all volumes are from the same library. Though he travels from place to place—Switzerland, the Orkneys, Germany, Russia, England and the wilds of Tartary—he sees not the particularities but the common traits of these societies. For him, the world is almost featureless. He deals in abstracts, even though he learns details from various books of history. “I read of men concerned in public affairs governing or massacring their species. I felt the greatest ardour for virtue arise within me, and abhorrence for vice, as far as I understood the signification of these terms, relative as they were, as I applied them, to pleasure and pain alone.”349 And yet these lessons will prove fruitless. Human libraries, the monster will learn, contain for him only alien literature.
Illustration by Chevalier for the 1831 edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus.
At home in a single place and at home in the world are two notions that can both be experienced as negative. Count Dracula trusts only his private library. He prides himself on being boyar (belonging to the Russian nobility), and can scornfully list a number of nationalities he is not. Frankenstein’s monster, having no library of his own, looks for his reflection in every book he encounters, and yet never succeeds in recognizing his own story in those “foreign” pages.
And yet the possibility of a greater and deeper experience was always there for either of them. Seneca, echoing Stoic notions from four hundred years earlier, denied that the only books that should matter to us are those of our contemporaries and fellow citizens. According to Seneca, we can pick from any library whatever books we wish to call ours; each reader, he tells us, can invent his own past. He observed that the common assumption—that our parents are not of our choosing—is in fact untrue; we have the power to select our own ancestry. “Here are families with noble endowments,” he writes, pointing at his bookshelf. “Choose whichever you wish to belong to. Your adoption will give you not only the name but actually the property, and this you need not guard in a mean or niggardly spirit: the more people you share it with, the greater it will become…. This is the sole means of prolonging your mortality, rather than transforming it into immortality.” Whoever realizes this, says Seneca, “is exempt from the limitations of humanity; all ages are at his service as at the service of a god. Has time gone by? He holds it fast in recollection. Is time now present? He makes use of it. Is it still to come? He anticipates it. The amalgamation of all time into one, makes his life long.”350 For Seneca, it was not the notion of superiority that mattered (Plutarch made fun of those who considered the moon of Athens superior to the moon of Corinth351) but that of communality, the sharing among all human beings of one common reason under one divine logos. As a consequence, he widened the circle of the self to embrace not only family and friends but also enemies and slaves, as well as barbarians or foreigners, and ultimately the whole of humanity.
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 Émile 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 of Virgil.358
“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 Naudé, 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 coenationum 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