Virgil

“I never slept with the boy,” she said, “But I fell for Virgil, and I’ve slept with the book many times.”

ANNE FADIMAN, Ex Libris

Happy 30th This Ain’t!

Photo: Eitan Krein, Sailing Around Koh Tao
Thanks Justus

“to dislocate the complacent mind”

Only the educated are free.*

By downsizing what is most dangerous (and most essential) about our education, namely the deep civic function of the arts and the humanities, we’re well on our way to producing a nation of employees, not citizens. Thus the world is made safe for commerce, but not safe.

… the humanities has the potential to be dangerous … because it is impossible to say where the individual mind might wander off to while reading, what unsettling associations might suggest themselves, what unscripted, unapproved questions might float to the surface. It’s been said before: in the margins of the page, over the course of time, for the simple reason that we shape every book we read and are slightly shaped by it in turn, we become who we are. Which is to say individuals just distinct enough from one another in our orientation toward “the truth” or “the good” to be difficult to control.

The humanities, done right, are the crucible within which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be. Their method is confrontational, their domain unlimited, their “product” not truth but the reasoned search for truth, their “success” something very much like Frost’s momentary stay against confusion … they complicate our vision, pull our most cherished notions out by the roots, flay our pieties. Because they grow uncertainty. Because they expand the reach of our understanding (and therefore our compassion), even as they force us to draw and redraw the borders of tolerance. Because out of all this work of self-building might emerge an individual capable of humility in the face of complexity; an individual formed through questioning and therefore unlikely to cede that right; an individual resistant to coercion, to manipulation and demagoguery in all their forms. The humanities, in short, are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values. There is no better that I am aware of.

MARK SLOUKA, Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school Harper’s Magazine, September 2009.

Photo: Professing

*Epictetus

My library was dukedom enough.*

Every reader is either a pausing wanderer or a traveler returned.

It’s late at night. It’s raining heavily. I can’t sleep. I wander into my library, take a book off its shelf and read.

ALBERTO MANGUEL, The Library at Night ; Toronto : Knopf, 2006.

*William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Consolation, perhaps. Perhaps illumination.

Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.

The Abnaki people of North America believed that a special group of deities, the Oonagamessok, presided over the making of petroglyphs, and they explained the gradual disappearance of these rock engravings by saying that the gods were angry because of the lack of attention accorded them since the arrival of the whites. The petroglyphs of our common past are fading not because of the arrival of a new technology but because we are no longer moved to read them. We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands and thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology’s virtues. The world, as Crusoe discovered, is always large enough to accommodate one more marvel. Being a cosmopolitan today may mean being eclectic, refusing to exclude one technology for the sake of another. Our tendency to build walls is useful only to provide a starting point for self-definition, walls that contain the bed in which we are born, in which we dream, we breed and we die; but outside the walls lies Siddhartha’s realization that all human beings grow old, are prone to nightmare and disease, and all must ultimately come to the same implacable end. Books endlessly repeat that one same story.

Among the libraries’ new incarnations are some that dispense with (or cannot afford) new technologies. In 1990 the Columbian Ministry of Culture set up an organization of itinerant libraries that would take books to the farthest corners of the country… on donkey’s backs up into the jungle and the sierra… Most of the books are technical works, agricultural handbooks and manuals on water filtration, collections of sewing patterns and veterinary guides, but a few novels and other literary works are included. According to one librarian, the books are always safely accounted for. “I know of only one instance in which a book was not returned,” she told me. “We had taken, along with the usual practical titles, a Spanish translation of the Iliad. When the time came to exchange it, the villagers refused to give it back. We decided to make them a present of it, but we asked them why they wanted to keep that particular title. They explained that Homer’s story exactly reflected their own: it told of a war torn country in which mad gods wilfully decide the fate of humans who never know exactly what the fighting is about, or when they will be killed.

As those remote Columbian readers know, our existence flows, like an impossible river, in two directions: from the endless mass of names, places, creatures, stars, books, rituals, memories, illuminations and stones we call the world to the face that stares at us every morning from the depth of a mirror; and from that face, from that body which surrounds a centre we cannot see, from that which names us when we say “I,” to everything that is Other, outside, beyond. A sense of who we are individually, coupled with a sense of being citizens, collectively, of an inconceivable universe, lends something like meaning to our life—a meaning put into words by the books in our libraries.



ALBERTO MANGUEL, The Library at Night ; Toronto : Knopf, 2006.

Photo: “Circus of Dreams” – Toronto Reference Library, Nuit Blanche 08 by Chris_L777

Reader v. learner

A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the onset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what it suits us to consider the more human passion for pure and disinterested reading.

VIRGINIA WOOLF, “Hours in a Library,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, v.2, 1912-1918. ed. Andrew McNeille ; London : Hogarth Press, 1987.

Photo: Biblioteca Vasconcelos

more >

Hardcover

Everything there is to know…may be only a click away, but there are still a few of us who’d rather have the book than the click. A bookman’s love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them.

LARRY McMURTRY, Books: A Memoir ; New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.

Artist: Rex

My steady.

In these days, when more of us run than read, and when what we know exceeds what we understand, let me urge a return to the book. The book remains that small handy instrument that we call a key. We can all carry it and with it we can unlock most of the doors to the unimaginable beauties that lie somewhere beyond the TV set, to the east of the movies, and to the west of the moonshine that flows from too many media of communication. Best of all, the book is not a fleeting fancy. It is steady. It remains ready for reference, for reassurance, and paradoxically for the comfort of companionship as well as the luxury of solitude. I am for it.

WALT KELLEY, Pogo Files for Pogophiles (Richfield, Minn. : Spring Hollow Books, 1992), 217.

Fortune.

 

 

Know me.

What is a book?

Knowledge doesn’t have a shape. There are just too many useful, powerful, and beautiful ways to make sense of our world.

Books are for use.

Every person his or her books.

Every book its readers.

Save the time of the reader; save the time of the library staff.

The library is a growing organism.*

Shilayi Ramamrita RANGANATHAN, The Five Laws of Library Science

_____

Suppose that now, for the first time in history, we are able to arrange our concepts without the silent limitations of the physical. How might our ideas, organizations, and knowledge itself change?

. . . as we invent new principles of organization that make sense in a world of knowledge freed from physical constraints, information doesn’t just want to be free. It wants to be miscellaneous.

. . . now we—the customers, the employees, anyone—We can confront the miscellaneous directly in all its unfulfilled glory. We can do it ourselves and, more significantly, we can do it together, figuring out the arrangements that make sense for us now and the new arrangements that make sense a minute later. Not only can we find what we need faster, but traditional authorities cannot maintain themselves by insisting that we go through them. The miscellaneous order is not transforming only business. It is changing how we think the world itself is organized and—perhaps more important—who we think has the authority to tell us so.

DAVID WEINBERGER, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

* My ital.

From Village to Market.

The good news: “Canada’s Best Independent Bookstore” isn’t closing. This Ain’t The Rosedale Library is simply moving to one of Toronto’s last bastions of Bohemia, Kensington Market (86 Nassau Street). While this pretty much “nails the coffin” regarding the dearth of any/all places of interest on Church Street, it bodes well for small press literary lions Dan and Charlie and their legion of devoted booklovers (count me as one).

More good news: their current “Moving Sale” . . . 30%-off all hardcovers, 50%-off all remainders (and this is remainder heaven). Stock up on some great lit/poetry!

Photo: blogTO