A Reader on Reading

The ideal library has easy and plentiful access to food, drink, and photocopying machines.

The ideal library is both secluded and public, intimate and open to social intercourse, meant for meditation and for dialogue, parsimonious and generous, erudite and questioning, full of the despair of plenty and the hope of what has not yet been read.

The ideal library holds the promise of every possible book.

Every book in the ideal library has its echo in another.

The ideal library is an everlasting, ever-renewed anthology.

The ideal library has no closing hours.

The ideal library allows scribbling in its books.

The ideal library is both popular and secret. It holds all the acknowledged classics and all the classics known to only a few readers. In the ideal library Dante’s Commedia sits next to Phil Cousineau’s Deadlines, Montaigne’s Essays next to Eduardo Lourengo’s Montaigne, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary next to Edgardo Cozarinsky’s The Bride of Odessa, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov next to Lazlo Floldenyi’s Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears.

In the ideal library, the reader’s task is to subvert the established order.

The number of books in the ideal library varies. The Library of Alexandria is said to have held seven hundred thousand scrolls; Jorge Luis Borges’s bookshelves contained barely five hundred volumes; the Birkenau concentration camp for children had a clandestine library of eight precious books that had to be hidden away in a different place every night.

Even when built out of walls and shelves and books, the ideal library is in the mind. The ideal library is the remembered library.

The ideal library suggests one continuous text with no discernable beginning and no foreseeable end.

In the ideal library there are no forbidden books and no recommended books.

The ideal library is familiar both to Saint Jerome and to Noam Chomsky.

In the ideal library no reader ever feels unwanted.

Every page in the ideal library is the first. None is the last.

Like Paul Valéry’s boxes in the brain, the ideal library has sections inscribed thus: To study on a more favorable occasion. Never to be thought about. Useless to go into further. Contents unexamined. Pointless business. Known treasure that can only be examined in a second life. Urgent. Dangerous. Delicate. Impossible. Abandoned. Reserved. Let others deal with this! My strong point. Difficult. Etc.

The ideal library disarms the curse of Babel.

The ideal library symbolizes everything a society stands for. A society depends on its libraries to know who it is because libraries are society’s memory.

The ideal library can grow endlessly without demanding more physical space, and can offer knowledge of everything without demanding more physical time. As a beautiful impossibility, the ideal library exists outside time and outside space.

Ancient ossuaries bore the inscription “What you are, we once were; what we are, you shall be.” Much the same can be said of the ideal library’s books and of their readers.

The ideal library is not an ossuary.

Some of the earliest libraries were kept by Egyptian priests, who furnished the departed souls with books to guide them through the kingdom of the dead. The ideal library maintains this soul-guiding function.

The ideal library both renews and preserves its collection. The ideal library is fluid.

There are certain books that, in themselves, are an ideal library. Examples: Melville’s Moby-Dick, Dante’s Commedia, Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe.

No compass is necessary in the ideal library. Its physical appearance is also its intellectual structure.

The architect of the ideal library is, first and foremost, an ideal reader.

The impossible task of every tyrant is to destroy the ideal library.

The impossible task of every reader is to rebuild the ideal library.

The ideal library (like every library) holds at least one line that has been written exclusively for you.

The Library of the

Wandering Jew

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see,

it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice

as fast as that.”

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 2