The Library at Night

by Alberto Manguel

we can learn from its splendid ambition that what was one man's experience can become, through the alchemy of words, the experience of all, and how that experience, distilled once again into words, can serve each singular reader for some secret, singular purpose.

I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.

"Not a wheel must grate, not a light glimmer. The curtains must be close drawn."195 As if it were night.

"merely a supermarket to which consumers come to look for the cheapest possible product."248

by stressing velocity over reflection and brevity over complexity, preferring snippets of news and bytes of facts over lengthy discussions and elaborate dossiers, and by diluting informed opinion with reams of inane babble, ineffectual advice, inaccurate facts and trivial information, made attractive with brand names and manipulated statistics.

But the Web is an instrument. It is not to blame for our superficial concern with the world in which we live. Its virtue is in the brevity and multiplicity of its information; it ca...

But for the victims, of course, no reasons, literary or other, can excuse or expiate the deeds of their torturers. Nick Caistor, in his introduction to the English edition of Nunca mcis, the report on the "disappeared" during the Argentinian military dictatorship, reminds us that the stories that ultimately reach us are but the reports of the survivors. "One can only speculate," says Caistor, "as to what accounts of atrocity the thousands of dead took with them to their unmarked graves.""'

It is difficult to understand how people continue to carry out the human gestures of everyday life when life itself has become inhuman; how, in the midst of starving and sickness, beatings and slaughter, men and women persist in civilized rituals of courtesy and kindness, inventing stratagems of survival for the sake of a speck of something loved, for one book rescued out of thousands, one reader out of tens of thousands, for a voice that will echo until the end of time the words of job's servant: "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee." Throughout history, the victor's library stands as an emblem of power, repository of the official version, but the version that haunts us is the other, the version in the library of ashes. The victim's library, abandoned or destroyed, keeps on asking, "How were such acts possible?" My prayer book belongs to that questioning library.

Evil requires no reason.

In the United States, attempts to curtail the reading of the black population date from the earliest days of slavery. In

order to prevent slaves from rebelling, it was essential that they remain illiterate. If slaves learned to read, it was argued, they would become informed of political, philosophical and religious arguments in favour of abolition, and rise against their masters. Therefore, slaves who learned to read, even the Bible, were often punished with death; it was assumed that, while conversion of the slaves was "convenient, 11182 knowledge of the Scriptures was to be acquired only through the eyes of their white masters.

We have always wanted to remember more, and we will continue, I believe, to weave webs to catch words in the hope that somehow, in the sheer quantity of accumulated utterances, in a book or on a screen, there will be a sound, a phrase, a spelled-out thought that will carry the weight of an answer.

The suspicion that we and the world are made in the image of something wonderfully and chaotically coherent far beyond our grasp, of which we are also part; the hope that our exploded cosmos and we, its stardust, have an ineffable meaning and method; the delight in retelling the old metaphor of the world as a book we read and in which we too are read; the conceit that what we can know of reality is an imagination made of language-all this finds its material manifestation in that self-portrait we call a library. And our love for it, and our lust to see more of it, and our pride in its accomplishments as we wander through shelves full of books that promise more and more delights, are among our happiest, most moving proofs of possessing, in spite of all the miseries and sorrows of this life, a more intimate, consolatory, perhaps redeeming faith in a method behind the madness than any jealous deity could wish upon us.