Nashwaak Review - Volume 18-19
Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night
by
Trevor Sawler
There is a certain attraction to simply wandering around a
library with no particular purpose in mind — just wandering from
shelf to shelf, randomly picking up books whose topics are sometimes
obscure, sometimes engaging, and sometimes simply baffling.
Each new title is ripe with possibilities, and gives you a
fleeting glimpse into someone else’s view of the world. Admittedly,
it’s rather like playing roulette, as you never know what
the contents of a given volume might be, but even a short sojourn
through the stacks is bound to give you insight into something
you hadn’t even known would be of interest beforehand.
In the modern era, where virtually instantaneous access
to information is both expected and mundane, this might seem a bit backwards. Why bother going to a library at all, when with
the aid of a laptop, a reasonably fast Internet connection, and
Google you can know far more about any topic than you ever wanted to? In fact, I have a number of otherwise intelligent friends
who seem convinced that libraries themselves are destined to
become obsolete.
Sacrilege, I say.
Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night is the metaphoric
equivalent of a peaceful night spent exploring the stacks. This is
not to suggest that the variety of topics explored in the book are
entirely peaceful; quite the contrary. The opening lines set the
tone for much of what is to follow:
The starting point is a question.
Outside theology and fantastic literature, few
can doubt that the main features of our universe
are its dearth of meaning and lack of discernable
purpose. And yet, with bewildering optimism, we
continue to assemble whatever scraps of information
we can gather in scrolls and books and
computer chips, on shelf after library shelf,
whether material, virtual, or otherwise, pathetically
intent on lending the world a semblance of
sense and order, while knowing perfectly well that,
however much we’d like to believe the contrary,
our pursuits are sadly doomed to failure.
Why then do we do it? Though I knew from
the start that the question would most likely remain
unanswered, the quest seemed worthwhile
for its own sake. This book is the story of that
quest.
With lines like this, you might suspect that we are in for
a reconsideration of the world view espoused by Sartre and the
rest of the existentialist crowd; fortunately, this is not the case.
Part philosophical consideration, part personal introspection, and
part social commentary, this book is a beautifully illustrated ramble
through a seemingly chaotic plethora of topics. The question
he poses at the beginning of the book – if the universe is ultimately
meaningless and purposeless, why bother trying to give
it order – is one that he honestly tries to answer.
The book is arranged thematically, and considers libraries
as both storehouses of knowledge and architectural wonders;
it looks on them as autobiographies of their owners and as statements of national identity. It examines small personal libraries
and libraries that started as both business and philanthropic ventures.
It looks at the benefits and drawbacks of modern “virtual”
libraries. It compares collections that have grown organically over
time with little or no thought to categorization to those that are
both rigidly catalogued and carefully maintained. Although the book is carefully researched and full of concrete historical analysis,
it manages to escape the dry, academic tone that you might
expect from such a work; it is closer to an actual walk through the stacks than any kind of scholarly work.
What saves this book from even approaching a dry, scholarly
tone is the way that connections are made between the various
topics that Manguel holds up for our consideration. The connections
are not concrete, nor are they necessarily directly related
to the topics themselves; rather, they are intuitive. Everything
in a library is connected to everything else, even if the connection is tenuous and difficult to grasp. The overriding connection,
Manguel seems to suggest, stems from our desire to
impose a semblance of order on a decidedly unordered universe.
For Manguel, the library is the “emblem of man’s power to act
through thought.” And remember, this is not just a book about
the library; it is about the library at night, when “the library lamps
are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but this space of
books remains in existence.... In the dark, with the windows lit
and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a
universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate
those of the shapeless universe beyond.”
Manguel takes us on a journey through the great libraries
of the past as well as their modern equivalents. Sadly, his assessment
of the relative value placed upon modern libraries in this post-literate age is both accurate and disheartening: “Our society,”
he says, “accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading—once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive—is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and
does not contribute to the common good… In our society, reading
is nothing but an ancillary act, and the great repository of our
memory and experience, the library, is considered less a living
entity than an inconvenient storage room.”
The next logical step in this information age – the completely
virtual library – is also held up for consideration, and not
with the optimism undoubtedly fueling any number of venture
capital backed startups in Silicon Valley. The always open, universally
available cyber-libraries of the not-too-distant future are
flawed in that they stress “velocity over reflection and brevity
over complexity.” The Internet, according to Manguel, is a wonderful
tool, but it prefers “snippets of news and bytes of facts
over lengthy discussions”, and it “dilutes informed opinion with
reams of inane babble, ineffectual advice, inaccurate facts and
trivial information, made attractive with brand names and manipulated
statistics.” I found it interesting how both the traditional,
historic library and the flashy Internet-based equivalent
were both treated as though they were conscious entities in this
book; the former comes across as an erudite, well-read, almost
fatherly figure, while the latter is the kind of person who has
pale skin, and dreams of someday talking to an actual girl. The
traditional library takes joy in sorting, cataloguing, and cherishing
the books that define a culture and give meaning to the world
around us; the cyber-library would cheerfully shelve a first edition
of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake right beside William Shatner’s
ghost-written SciFi novels. It’s refreshing to see technology
treated as the tool that it ought to be, rather than as an end unto
itself.
The Library at Night is for anyone who has ever said “Yes, actually, I do need all of these books, thank you very much.”
It is a compelling read, and if you have a life-long love affair with the printed word, this is definitely worth your time.