In our time, bereft of ancient dreams – which we’ve replaced with dreams of pillage – the illusion of immortality is created by technology. The Web, and its promise of a voice and a site for all, is our equivalent of the mare incognitum, the unknown sea that lured ancient travellers with the temptation of discovery. Immaterial as water, too vast for any moral apprehension, the Web’s outstanding qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal. Like the sea, The web is volatile: 70 percent of its communications last less than four months. Its virtue (its virtuality) entails a constant present – which for medieval scholars was one of the definitions of hell. Alexandria and it’s scholars, by contrast, never mistook the true nature of the past; they knew it to be the source of an ever-shifting present in which new readers engaged with old books which became new in the reading process. Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.
Alberto Manguel, The Library At Night
My current “stack”:
Edmund White, Chaos; Hotel De Dream
Margaret Atwood, The Door
Alan Weisman, The World Without Us
Alan Dershowitz, Blasphemy
Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, Prayer: A History
Tariq Ramadan, In the Footsteps of the Prophet
Photo: Toledo-Lucas County Public Library, Main Branch
*Flaubert
