On libraries

From Jorge Luis Borges's "The Library of Babel" (1941)

The Universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below--one after another, endlessly. The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon's six sides; the height of a normal librarian. One of the hexagon's free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn opens onto another gallery, identical to the first--identical in fact to all. To the left and right of the vestibule are two tiny compartments. One is for sleeping, upright; the other, for satisfying one's physical necessities. Through this space, too, there passes a spiral staircase, which winds upward and downward into the remotest distance. In the vestibule there is a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances. Men often infer form this mirror that the library is not infinite--if it were, what need would there be for that illusory replication. I prefer to dream that burnished surfaces are a figuration and promise of the infinite. . . . Like all the men of the Library, in my younger days I traveled; I have journeyed in quest of a book, perhaps the catalog of catalogs. now that my eyes can hardly make out what I myself have written, I am preparing to die, a few leagues from the hexagon where I was born. When I am dead, compasionate hands will throw me over the railing; my tomb will be the unfathomable air, my body will sink for ages, and will decay and dissolve in the wind engendered by my fall, which shall be infinite. I declare that the Library is endless.

Busy today, so all I've got for you is a couple of bits I've come across lately about libraries. Borges's infinite library that is the universe seems a good lead into a bit from John Crowley's Aegypt (1987), on the role of distant libraries in forging in the main character, Pierce, a lifelong obsession with mythical, mystical, shadowy pasts:

Such was the family Pierce was to make his way in; in their isolation they were like some antique family of gentry, in the specialness of their circumstances like foreigners living within a pale. It was only the Oliphant children who were taught by the priest's sister; only the Oliphants (as far as Pierce knew) who every month received from the state library in far-off, blue grass-green Lexington, a box of books. . . . Every month the read books were packed up and shipped back, and on receipt another box would be sent, more or less filling the vague requests on the Oliphants' list (Mother West-wind, more horse stories, "something about masonry," anything of Trollope's) and picked up at the post office, and opened in excitement and disappointment mixed, Christmas every month. Pierce remembering his confusion and contempt before this bizarre system--bizarre to a child who had had the vast, the virtually illimitable reaches of the Brooklyn Public to wander in, his father went every two weeks and Pierce had always gone with him and could have any book he pointed at--Pierce remembering those battered library boxes wondered if it had been they, those librarians or whoever they were who had filled them, who by sending him some book full of antiquated notions and quaint orthography had first suggested to him the existence of that shadow country, that far old country that was sort of Egypt but not Egypt, no, not Egypt at all, a country with a different history, whose name was spelled too with a small but crucial difference: it was not Egypt but Aegypt.

The small town I grew up in had an old Carnegie library, but its offerings were necessarily limited, and we, too, relied on similarly vague requests sent off to larger libraries in other towns and cities. Now I'm spoiled, living half a block from a branch of the Chicago Public Library and also having access to a major research library. Almost anything I want is available--though sometimes just barely. When I decided earlier this week that I couldn't really approach Endless Things (2007), the final volume of John Crowley's Aegypt tetralogy, without revisiting the first three, which are out of print, I was surprised to find that the Chicago Public Library system only has three copies of each--and one was checked out, presumably in the hands of a Crowley fan who, having the same idea I had, was quicker on the draw. Maybe the uniform paperback editions that Overlook is bringing out in the autumn will inspire the library to increase its holdings.

As regular readers know, I'm at heart more of a book buyer than book borrower, but I still make fairly regular use of the local library. It's particularly good for a summer Saturday afternoon when nothing on my shelves seems right; I can head out to the library confident that within ten minutes I can be back in my chair with a good mystery novel or two. People have of course been using libraries in that way--to pick up a quick bit of pleasurable reading--since they were invented. John Brewer describes a couple of early libraries in The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1997):

The largest circulating libraries were more than adjuncts to a bookselling business. In the capitals of the three kingdoms, in the large provincial towns and in resorts such as Bath and Margate, circulating libraries offered comfortable, spacious surroundings in which customers could gossip, flirt, browse, examine newspapers and reviews, and choose from a selection of every kind of book. The late eighteenth-century engraving of the library at Margate, sold jointly by its proprietor and engraver, conveys the ambience library proprietors wanted: one of leisure and display as well as learning.



The biggest libraries published catalogues: John Bell's famous London Library contained more than 8,000 volumes; Sibbald's in Edinburgh offered its patrons a choice of 6,000 titles in 1786; and Ann Ireland's Leicester Library, though not as large a Barber's in Newcastle, nevertheless housed 2,500 books. These libraries were not only repositories of fiction. The number of novels and romances was never as great as those of history, travel, and geography; indeed for every "frivolous" volume there were two of more serious reading matter. But these figures refer to books on the shelf: no records survive to reveal the pattern of borrowing in a major circulating library. It may well have been that the sober histories and detailed travellers' tales never received a second glance as readers hurried to the shelves of multi-volumed novels and well-thumbed romances. Isaac Cruikshank's The Circulating Library certainly takes this view.



The shelves for novels, tales and romances are empty--all the books are out--but the sections for history, sermons, voyages and travels are full, attesting to their unpopularity.

That was before libraries had learned to stock multiple copies of the most popular trashy books: the Chicago Public Library has, according to their online catalog, 26 copies of The Da Vinci Code (2004), about half of which are available right now for checkout.

It seems unlikely that any trashy books marred the shelves of the library John Stow describes here in his A Survey of London (1598):

Joceline of Furness writeth, that Thean, the first Archbishop of London, in the reign of Lucius, built the said church by the aid of Ciran, chief butler to King Lucius; and also that Eluanus, the second archbishop, built a library to the same adjoining, and converted many of the Druids, learned men in the pagan law.

Just think of the splendid confusion a time traveler could create by stealing on of Chicago Public's extra copies of The Da Vinci Code and slipping it into the stacks of Eluanus's library. By the time the historical ripples reached the present, Dan Brown's faux-scholarly mishmash might actually have created the sort of secret societies it purports to uncover--though I suppose even Druids might find his characters and sentences a bit wooden.

But people do enjoy fluff and trash, and I'm not one to deny anyone pleasure from books, of whatever kind. I think D. J. Enright, in Interplay: A Kind of Commonplace Book (1987), gets at least part of it right:

A love of literature, Virginia Woolf wrote, is often roused and initially nourished, not by good books but by bad ones. "It will be an ill day when all the reading is done in libraries and none of it in tubes." And vice versa, too.

Interplay, too, is out of print, and obscure enough as to be missing from most library collections. But a commonplace book, being a bedside and armchair companion, is best owned rather than borrowed anyway--and there an Enright fan is in luck: searchable used bookstore inventories have made it readily available to anyone anywhere.

And, as John Crowley clearly understands, there are few things more inherently exciting to a reader than getting a box of books in the mail.

On dreams

From The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Volume 1: Inferno (1308), translated by Robert M. Durling:

In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to
myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost
Ah, how hard a thing it is to say what that wood
was, so savage and harsh and strong that the
thought of it renews my fear!

It is so bitter that death is little more so! But to
treat of the good that I found there, I will tell of
the other things I saw.
I cannot really say how I entered there, so full of
sleep was I at the point when I abandoned the true
way.

As I've said before, coincidences sometimes become connections, and with dreams on the brain after reading Robert Herrick's "The Vine," dreams were what I seemed to keep stumbling across (better than into, I suppose) this week.

First, in reading a review of Haruki Murakami's Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2006) by Christian Caryl in the March 1, 2007 issue of the New York Review of Books, I was struck by the following passage from a lecture Murakami delivered at a Cambridge, Massachusetts church in 2005:

In some ways a narrative is like a dream. You don't analyze a dream--you just pass through it. A dream is sometimes healing and sometimes makes you anxious. A narrative is just the same--you are just in it. A novelist is not an analyst. He just transforms one scene into another. A novelist is one who dreams wide awake. He decides to write and he sits down and dreams away, then wraps it into a package caleld fiction which allows other people to dream. Fiction warms the hearts and minds of the readers. So I believe that there is something deep and enduring in fiction, and I have learned to trust the power of narrative.

This seems to jibe with my assessment of Murakami's writing from back in the summer. I opened that post by recounting a dreamstory from Akira Kurosawa's film Dreams, and I followed it by arguing in favor of letting things sometimes just be what they are in Murakami's work, letting the inexplicable remain unexplained. The meaning is there--and for each book I could give some guesses at it--but it isn't to be extracted; it's of a piece with the presentation, hewing to an internal, organic logic that bears more resemblance to dream than to reality. It blunts our usual attempts to understand and only delivers up sense once we've begun to succumb to Murakami's own patterns of thought and causality.

I then was reading Anne Carson's wonderfully strange book, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (2005). Opening an essay called "Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)," which travels from Homer, Socrates, and Aristotle to Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop, and Tom Stoppard, is the following:

My earliest memory is of a dream. It was in the house where we lived when I was three or four years of age. I dreamed I was asleep in the house in an upper room.

Then I awoke and came downstairs and stood in the living room. The lights were on in the living room, although it was hushed and empty. The usual dark green sofa and chairs stood along the usual pale green walls. It was the same old living room as ever, I knew it well, nothing was out of place. And yet it was utterly, certainly, different. Inside its usual appearance the living room was as changed as if it had gone mad.

Later in life, when I was learning to reckon with my father, who was afflicted with and eventually died of dementia, this dream recovered itself to me, I think because it seemed to bespeak the situation of looking at a well-known face, whose appearance is exactly as it should be in every feature and detail, except that it is somehow, deeply and glowingly, strange.

The dream of the green living room was my first experience of such strangeness, and I find it as uncanny today as I did when I was three. But there was no concept of madness or dementia available to me at that time. So, as far as I can remember, I explained the dream to myself by saying that I had caught the living room sleeping. I had entered it from the sleep side. And it took me years to recognize, or even to frame a question about, why I found this entrance into strangeness so supremely consoling. For despite the spookiness, inexplicability, and later tragic reference of the green living room, it was and remains for me a consolation to think of it lying there, sunk in its greenness, breathing its own order, answerable to no one, apparently penetrable anywhere and yet so perfectly disguised in the propaganda of its own as to become in a true sense something incognito at the heart of our sleeping house.

Despite very different surface tones and effects, the works of Murakami and Anne Carson (who won me as a fan ten years ago by describing in a poem the taste of a metal screen door as "medieval") share an organic strangeness, an underlying sense that one thing follows another not because anyone expects or asks it to but simply because that's what it does.

Lewis Carroll refined that sort of logic, running it through his memories of the operations of a child's mind, in creating Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Things happen in Wonderland for reasons that are not immediately obvious, but when Alice challenges the creatures she finds there they can always explain their actions--and their logic, though frequently frustrating, is very hard to refute. I may be forgetting something, but I don't remember Alice ever winning an argument in Wonderland--do you?

Says D. J. Enright, who is the one who got me thinking about Alice, in his Interplay: A Kind of Commonplace Book (1995):

What is essential to children's books--as distinct from some others--is good sense. . . . Without a basis of logic, or at least a strong presence, fantasy is mere whimsy.

That, I would argue, goes the same for dreams: no matter how impenetrable their underlying rules and assumptions may be once we're awake, while we're within the dream we can feel the press of them, the lines of causality that keep us from being all that troubled by what would otherwise be inexplicable.

Enright returns to Alice:

"The reader looks in vain for any immediate reason why Alice should have dreamt such a dream or for any very edifying result deriving from it": Illustrated Times, 16 December 1865, reviewing Alice in Wonderland. But easy to see why the author chatted fluently to children and started to stammer as soon as grown-ups came on the scene.

Finally, because it's fun to end with a scare, I'll leave you with a dream a friend of mine had many years ago. I'll call her Mona, rather than her real name, since I've not ever asked her if I may write about this dream:

After sitting up late into the night reading in bed in her little room at the top of the stairs, Mona drifted off to a troubled sleep. At about the midpoint of the night, she was abruptly awakened by a scraping, creaking sound; the window by her bed was being slowly pushed up. She turned her head, but then her muscles froze completely.

An arm slipped through the narrow opening, and, feeling its way with its fingers across the sill and onto the bedcovers, like a blind elephant searching out food with its trunk, it began plucking at the tousled covers, looking for Mona. After a few seemingly endless moments of being frozen in terror, Mona let loose with a blood-curdling scream; jerking upright, she woke up. The window was closed. It had all been a dream.

Breathing hard, heart pounding, Mona attempted to collect herself. As she reached to turn on her lamp, her window scraped open, and an arm pushed through, reaching out for her. She screamed again . . . and she woke up again.

This time, Mona left her bedroom and sat on the staircase for a while, lights blazing, and smoked some cigarettes. She slept the rest of the night on the couch.

Sleep well.