A Reader on Reading

Alice and her Wonderland shadows play out for us the parts we enact in the real world. Their folly is tragic or amusing, they are themselves exemplary fools or they are eloquent witnesses to the folly of their shadowy brethren, they tell us stories of absurd or mad behavior which mirrors our own so that we may better see and understand it. The difference is that their folly, unlike ours, is framed by the margins of the page, contained by the however-uncertain imagination of their author. Crimes and evil deeds in the real world have sources so deep and consequences so distant that we can never hold them entirely in our understanding, we can merely clip them in a moment, box them in a judicial file, or observe them under the lens of psychoanalysis. Our deeds, unlike those of the great mad creatures of literature, seep far and wide into the world, infecting everything and every place beyond all help and purpose.

The folly of the world is unintelligible. We can (and do, of course) experience it, suffer it in the flesh and in the mind, fall under its merciless weight and be crushed by its implacable movement towards the precipice. We can even, in certain enlightened moments, rise through it to acts of extraordinary humanity, irrationally wise and insanely daring. For such acts, no words suffice. And yet, through language at its best, our folly can be trapped in its own doings, made to repeat itself, made to enact its cruelties and catastrophes (and even its glorious deeds) but this time under lucid observation and with protected emotion, beneath the aseptic covering of words, lit by the reading lamp set over the open book.

The flesh-and-blood beings at the Mad Hatter’s table — the military leaders, the torturers, the international bankers, the terrorists, the exploiters — cannot be forced to tell their story, to confess, to beg forgiveness, to admit that they are rational beings guilty of willful cruelty and destructive acts. But tales can be told and books can be written about them that might allow for a certain understanding of what they have done and for a judicious empathy. Their deeds bear no rational explanation, follow absurd logical rules, but their madness and their terror can be trapped for us, in all their consuming and illuminating fire, inside stories or “maps” where they can mysteriously lend our folly a kind of enlightened rationality, transparent enough to clarify our behavior and ambiguous enough to help us accept the indefinable.

PART EIGHT

The Numinous Library

“Now I declare that’s too bad!” Humpty Dumpty cried,

breaking into a sudden passion. “You’ve been listening at

doors — and behind trees — and down chimneys — or you

couldn’t have known it!”

“I haven’t indeed!” Alice said very gently. “It’s in a book.”

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 6

Notes Towards a Definition

of the Ideal Library

And noticed that they were filled with cupboards and bookshelves.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 1

THE IDEAL LIBRARY IS MEANT for one particular reader. Every reader must feel that he or she is the chosen one.

Above the door of the ideal library is written a variation of Rabelais’s motto: “LYS CE QUE VOUDRA,” “Read what you will.”

The ideal library is both virtual and material. It allows for every technology, every container, every manifestation of the text.

The ideal library is of easy access. No high stairs, no slippery esplanades, no confusing multiplicity of doors, no intimidating guards must stand between the reader and the books.

The ideal library has comfortable but supportive seats with armrests and a curved back, like those of the lamented Salle Labrouste at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The ideal library has ample desks, preferably with smooth leather tops, sockets for electronic equipment (on condition that they perform in utter silence), and soft individual lights that remind you of the green-glass reading lamps at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires.

In 1250, Richard de Fournival compared the ideal library to a hortus con-clusus, a walled garden.

The ideal library has warm walls of brick or wood, and also cool glass windows that open onto peaceful vistas. The ideal library is never a hortus entirely conclusus.

The ideal library holds mainly, but not only, books. It also collects maps, pictures, objects, music, voices, films, and photographs. The ideal library is a reading place in the broadest meaning of the term.

The ideal library allows every reader access to the stacks. A reader must be granted the freedom of chance encounters.

No shelf in the ideal library is higher or lower than the reach of the reader’s arm. The ideal library does not require acrobatics.

In the ideal library it is never too warm or too cold.

The ideal library organizes without labeling.

No section in the ideal library is conclusive.

The map of the ideal library is its catalogue.