LIBRARY
chapter 13. LIKE-MINDED #2
This is a sequel to:
This post has been translated from Dutch into English with DeepL. It will be manually edited and streamlined soon.
THE IMAGE of two trigrams: under Fire, above Heaven. From the Earth's surface, heat rises. Thermals, water vapour, condensation, clouds. Is there anything more impressive than clouds expanding in slow motion? Daily stuff? Nothing special? Instead of another trip to the mountains, stay close to home, look up, imposing mountain formations float past you, no day the same. Rediscover the humble pile cloud, the cumulus humilis. Or the imposing cumulus congestus. And at the end of a hot summer day, higher than a Himalayan giant, the cumulonimbus. Fire below, Heaven above: the image of accumulation, like-mindedness and community.
In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.
Mark Twain
The first libraries appeared in the Fertile Crescent, where the newly emerging agriculture and animal husbandry had made urban culture possible. Not yet a collection of papyrus scrolls, writings on parchment or shelves of paper books, but stacks of clay tablets. Heavy and thick, but supremely durable. Most are still perfectly legible now, after millennia.
And where libraries arise, there someone is appointed to create order in the multitude and avoid chaos. The first librarian we know of by name, wasnโt that Lao Zi, the author of the Tao Teh Ching? He was employed as an archivist at the court of the Zhou (Zhou dynasty 1046-245 BC) at a time of great political, social and military upheaval. At the same time, the arts flourished and great philosophical works saw the light of day. That must have been a magnificent library, the one of which Lao Zi was custodian.
๏ฟผA few hundred years later, things went completely wrong. Knowledge is a blessing, knowledge elevates, and is therefore threatening to those who hold power and want to perpetuate it. China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, after a long period of war, got all Chinese states under it and decreed the burning of all writings except what dealt with what could benefit the regime. Imagine, everything went up in flames and the cancelled writers and scholars were buried alive. In the shadow of this great drama, there were the small stories of the brave who risked their lives hiding books under the floor in the hope of better times.
It would not be the last time books would be burnt. On the contrary, what you don't like, burn it. Mayan and Aztec writings, Bibles and then Korans, pamphlets of freethinkers and devil verses, degenerate books in the 1930s in Germany, reactionary books in the 1960s in China, all the books that could be found in Fahrenheit 451. What ended up on all those pyres over the centuries could not have been more diverse. Yet it was always about the same arsonist: fear. If a single book can already reveal the overridden insecurity of the totalitarian mind, how dangerous is an entire library.
A place where all the knowledge and wisdom of the world was gathered - that was the vision of Alexander and his successors. A library eventually containing the unprecedented quantity of 500000 papyrus scrolls sprang up in the city in the Nile Delta, a study centre that for centuries attracted many of the most eminent scholars. Legend speaks of a great devastating fire, but today it is believed that the library went down over a longer period due to neglect, deliberate demolition and conflict. As during the great Qin book burning, works will have escaped the dance: secretly copied, smuggled out, hidden, only to reappear later in a subsequent era.
And - lets whisper about this and not wake up sleeping dogs - right now, history is repeating itself again. This time, not the destruction of papyrus or paper, but the erasure of entir digital libraries. How megalomaniacal or stupid is the ruler who wants his reservoir of knowledge and science to be wantonly destroyed. How terrified citizens have allowed themselves to be made, to let the destruction of knowledge happen just like that. But once again, there are courageous ones who silently copy and smuggle out scientific data.
Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.
Ray Bradbury
Is what we are experiencing now the perfect storm in which reading and the book go down, and in which the community frays apart? The world's most powerful man reading nothing, attention spans the length of TikTok movies, books of which only the AI summary is read, writers who cannot resist the temptation of the chatbot, a daily tsunami of words and opinions, what is left to believe, why reading anyway? Fahrenheit 541 already predicted a world where there would be no more time for books.
Only society can save society.
'Ray Bradbury warned about this back in 1953, in his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451: 'You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just make people stop reading them.' In that sense, TikTok is one of those alternative book burners that is already impressively dumbing down a generation.โ
Typical of that shift is that a rabid non-reader is now the most powerful person in our Western world. Once again, the United States has a president who fundamentally does not read. In his revealing book Fire and Fury (2018), US writer and journalist Michael Wolff quotes a White House official as saying: 'It's worse than you can imagine. Trump reads nothing - no one-page memos, no short policy documents, nothing.'
Met oortjes in dansen we naar een ontletterde toekomst - Christiaan Weijts in De Correspondent
Are the days of books gone for good? Book collections inexorably go into the paper bin when the owner dies. They cannot go to the second-hand bookshop; they have disappeared from the scene and the thrift shop can no longer dispose of the mountains of books. The hunting ground for the book archaeologist is atrophied. But are book markets out of time?
Once a week I cycle over the dike to Zwolle and forget about time in the local bookstore. Is it nostalgia, and a matter of time until it too will be gone?
Is book culture disappearing behind the glass of the museum display case?
Or are the library and reading room of all times and ripe for a revival? Listen - preferably late at night - to the podcast about the Bibliothรจque Sainte-Geneviรจve with Joe Pera (Apple of Spotify).
An original idea. That canโt be too hard. The library must be full of them.
Stephen Fry
A kingdom for an iPad. But against the grain, the love for the old-fashioned book grew. Let me tell you what extraordinary thing I found the other day, without looking, just bumping into it. Not in De Broeren in Zwolle and not in one of the famous historical libraries. But in the local thrift shop. And in the various mini bookcases. And on the unsurpassed Marktplaats...
To be continued:
