The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel

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Description

Inspired by the process of creating a library for his fifteenth-century home near the Loire, in France, Alberto Manguel, the acclaimed writer on books and reading, has taken up the subject of libraries. “Libraries,” he says, “have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I... read more

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Memorable Quotes

“Less keen on the tidy succession of dates and names than on our endless collecting efforts, I set off several years ago, not to compile another history of libraries nor to add another tome to the alarmingly extensive collection of bibliotechnology, but merely to give an account of my astonishment. "Surely we should find it both touching and inspiriting," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson over a century ago, "that in a field from which success is banished, our race should not cease to labour." p. 4”
“Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs. These evil white scabs rip off with difficulty, leaving leprous wounds and traces of slime to which adhere the dust and fluff of ages, making me wish for a special gummy hell to which the inventor of these stickers would be condemned. - p.17”
“To be the first to enter Circe's cave, the first to hear Ulysses call himself Nobody, is every reader's secret wish, granted over and over, generation after generation, to those who open the “Odyssey” for the first time. This modest “jus primae noctis,” or “first-night rights,” assures for the books we call classics their only useful immortality. - p. 219”
“Libraries are not, never will be, used by everyone. In Mesopotamia as in Greece, in Buenos Aires as in Toronto, readers and non-readers have existed side by side, and the non-readers have always constituted the majority. - p. 222”
“All surface and no volume, all present and no past, the Web aspires to be (advertises itself as) every user's home, in which communication is possible with every other user at the speed of thought. That is its main characteristic: speed. The Venerable Bede, lamenting the quickness and brevity of our life on earth, compared it to the passage of a bird through a well-lit dining hall, entering from the darkness at one end and exiting through the darkness at the other; our society would interpret Bede's lament as an act of boasting. p. 225”
“We no longer record the evolution of our intellectual creations. To a future observer, it will appear that our ideas were born fully developed, like Athena from her father's brow - except that, since our historical vocabulary will be forgotten, the cliché will mean nothing. - p. 226”
“Histories, chronologies and almanacs offer us the illusion of progress, even though, over and over again, we are given proof that there is no such thing. There is transformation and there is passage, but whether for better or for worse merely depends on the context and the observer. As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted a skill that has become subordinate to principles of mindless financial profit or mechanical efficiency, a skill for which governments care almost nothing. We have gone from one scale of values to the other many times, and will no doubt do so again. We can't be spared this erratic course, which seems to be an intrinsic part of our human nature, but we can at least sway with the knowledge of our swaying, and with the conviction that at one point or another our skill will once again be recognized as of the essence. p. 233”
“If time flows endlessly, as the mysterious connections between my books suggest, retaining its themes and discoveries throughout the centuries, then every misdeed, every treason, every evil act will eventually find its true consequences. After the story has stopped, just beyond the threshold of my library, Carthage will rise again from the strewn Roman salt. Don Juan will confront the anguish of Dona Elvira. Brutus will look again on Caesar's ghost, and every torturer will have to beg his victim's pardon in order to complete time's inevitable circle. p. 246”
“When Thomas Jefferson introduced the Argand lamp to New England in the mid-eighteenth century, it was observed that the conversation at dinner tables once lit by candlelight ceased to be as brilliant as before, because those who excelled in talking now took to their rooms to read. p. 270”
“"To imagine the plot of a novel is a happy task," Borges once said. "To actually write it is an exaggeration." p. 271 (in conversation with the author)”
“I keep a list of books that I feel are missing from my library and that I hope one day to buy, and another, more wishful than useful, of books I'd like to have but I don't even know exist. - p. 293”
“<Jean Jacques Rousseau> also insisted, "Distrust those cosmopolitans who seek in the depths of their books the duties they scorn to perform at home. This kind of philosopher professes love for the Tartars, in order to be excused from loving his neighbors." p. 314”
“Northrop Frye once observed that, had he been present at the birth of Christ, he did not think he would have heard the angels singing. "the reason why I think so is that I do not hear them now, and there is no reason to suppose that they have stopped." Therefore, I am not searching for revelation of any kind, since anything said to me is necessarily limited by what I'm capable of hearing and understanding. Not for knowledge beyond what, in some secret way, I already know. Not for illumination, to which I can't reasonably aspire. Not for experience, since ultimately I can only become aware of what is already in me. For what, then do I search, at the end of my library's story? Consolation, perhaps. Perhaps consolation. p.324-325”