Diary: (1) Andrew Hui on the Birth of the Private Library
We gather in libraries, or take a voyage around our room, another way of gathering
Petrarch drew his little house on a hilltop with a heron in the margin of his copy of Pliny’s Natural History with the inscription, “transalpina solitude mea iocundissima” (“my most pleasing transalpine solitude”). He wrote “isolation without literature is exile, prison, and torture; supply literature, and it becomes your country, freedom, and delight.” Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, MS Lat. 6802, fol. 143v
If you are reading this, gentle reader, you have probably been to a library. You may have one of your own. You make lists of books that you have read, want to read or want to write yourself. You buy, borrow, and give away books. Perhaps you organize your library by author, period, region, gender, size, color of the spine, order of acquisition (like in medieval monasteries), or, very likely, haphazardly. Maybe you arrange your books like the art historian Aby Warburg, who classified his collection according to the “law of the good neighbor,” that is, how good a conversation a book might have with the one next to it. His namesake library in London today still follows this quirky principle of serendipity. Georges Perec, in his playful “Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books,” says, “like the librarians of Babel in Borges’s story, who are looking for the book that will provide them with the key to all others, we oscillate between the illusion of perfection and the vertigo of the unattainable.” You might even, like me, practice the refined art of what the Japanese call tsundoku—buying books and not reading them.
“Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir,” Nietzsche says. Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage” captures the scene of the child enchanted by the library: “For the child, in love with maps and prints, the universe is equal to his vast appetite.” Every bibliophile has a primal scene of textual enamorment. I did not grow up with a house filled with books. I don’t remember my father ever reading a book and my mother back then only the Bible. As a first-generation Asian American in Texas, my epiphanic encounter began at the North Garland branch of Nicholson Memorial Library, tucked in between a micro-church and a minimart in a threadbare strip mall, a short walk from Webb Middle School. My book collection started at their annual book sale, where you could pick up hardcovers for a dollar and paperbacks for fifty cents. On the last day, you could fill up a brown grocery bag for five dollars. I also did deep dives in the sale bins of Half-Price Books and Goodwill, where I blew what was left of my $30 weekly allowance after gas and cafeteria lunch. What I acquired was a lot of dross, but there were some keepers. In those musty corners, the muses shined upon me: Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, and Jorge Luis Borges. Reading the arcana of The Name of the Rose, I thought, I want to learn more about what this man was talking about. For me, libraries have always fed my yearning to know everything. It also helped me ward off loneliness.
This week in Book Post for subscribers: the slim trio of novels that may be the greatest works of mid-century Latin-American literature, from Àlvaro Enrigue
The founding myth of comparative literature is that the great Erich Auerbach, a German Jew in the dark hours of World War II, wrote his masterpiece Mimesis in his studiolo in exile, while living in Istanbul. From across the Bosporus, he cast his melancholic eye toward Europe and gathered all of Western literature. He says he lacked critical editions and relied mostly on his memory. In reality, he was granted access to the library of the Dominican monastery of San Pietro di Galata (which had the complete Patrologia latina) by Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, the Vatican prelate who was to become Pope John XXIII. Years later, Auerbach ended up at Yale, with the magnificent Sterling Memorial Library at his doorstep. In New Haven today, there are 13 million titles.
Today, the Yale-NUS library in Singapore has around 30,000 and the Patrologia latina online. I first read Mimesis when I was a sophomore in college. Opening the first chapter, “Odysseus Scar,” changed my life. I never knew how with a few strokes of micro-stylistic analysis you could unlock a vast cultural cosmos. From that moment I wanted to become a literary critic. As an Asian American teaching the European classics in Asia, I’m used to looking at things from a distance. I have been able to do my research through the bricolage of Google sleuthing, JSTOR, Project Muse, document delivery services, interlibrary loan, Amazon global shipping, scholarly e-depositories, and file-sharing sites. Digital Ariels are quicker than transoceanic container ships. I hope my conceit is becoming clearer to you now: as I sit in my little studio in my corner of the world, I reach out to you, wherever you may be.
In post-pandemic times, we are forced, once more, to think about the interplay of solitude and society, quarantine and freedom, the quantum and the cosmos. An ancient Chinese saying goes, “The tip of an animal’s autumn hair can get lost in the unfathomable. This means that what is so small that nothing can be placed inside it is the same as something so large that nothing can be placed outside it.” As the world roars back to a new normal, we gather in libraries again, but it is always a good time to take a voyage around our rooms.
Read Part Two of this post here!
Andrew Hui is associate professor of humanities at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. He is the author of A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter and The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature. This post is drawn from his new book, The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries.
Book Post editor Ann Kjellberg will appear in a webinar this Friday at 1 pm with Jane Friedman about “How Literary Talent Gets Discovered,” more info here.
For a Day of Book Post, continue on to last Wednesday’s reviewer, Àlvaro Enrigue, talking about his recent novel You Dreamed of Empires at our partner (and Ann’s local) bookseller, Community Books at 7 pm on Friday.
Coming soon: Poetry workshops with two Book Post writers!
❧ April Bernard is offering a zoom workshop for poets, six Sundays beginning February 2. Write to us at office@bookpostusa.com and we will forward to her. April’s most recent book is The World Behind the World. Learn more about her work here.
❧ Glyn Maxwell is offering an in-person full day retreat/master class in the Hudson Valley (travel from NYC included) on April 12. Glyn’s most recent book is New and Selected Poems.
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Love "an animal hair in autumn" and its capacities.