ANNA VERCO

Alana Dee Haynes

‘swim’ -mixed media, 2013

Ramon Llull (1232/3-1316)

Pàgina del manuscrit de Karlsruhe on ens mostra a Ramon Llull

The ultimate library experience: Borges’ Library of Babel

Even in the age of the internet, there is nothing else quite like the way that a book can come alive in your hands. A book can sit on a shelf undisturbed for years, sometimes for generations, gathering dust, as metaphysically inert as any abstraction, until the mind that comes along to open it, literally and metaphorically, finds a world pressed between its pages. I have had this experience more times than I can count, and I never cease to be moved by it. Sometimes in happens in my own personal library. I frequent used book stores, and buy a lot of books for myself, Often these books go unread while I work on other projects. My interests shift, and evolve, and sometimes they even come full circle and realign, so that I find myself looking for a book that I know I purchased some years before. When I eventually find it and open it, there have been times that I find the receipt for the purchase. I thought I had bought the book five years ago or so, when in fact I bought it fifteen or twenty years before. It has been sitting there on the shelf all that time, ready to provide inspiration should my interests turn back in its direction.

The library at San Pedro de Timote.

That is in my own library, that fills my home. But I have had the same experience in others’ libraries. The library at the Hacienda Guachala and the Hacienda Zuleta, both in Ecuador, and the library at Sad Pedro de Timote in Uruguay reflected the catholic interests of the patrician families who held these estates. These are family libraries, collected over generations, probably by one or two or a few individuals with a passion for reading, and who brought the culture of their world to these rural enclaves. Here I have picked up books that were probably last read by someone now long ago having passed on and now enjoying the peace that surpasseth all understanding – as silent as a book on a shelf. There are in these libraries books in all languages and on all subjects jumbled together in exactly the way my books are jumbled together in my own library. I feel an immediate affinity for such collections.

The library at the Hacienda Zuleta; photo by Laura Nielsen

In less intimate settings, I have seen private libraries in palatial homes that have been turned into museums. Here the books reside behind glass, and beyond velvet ropes, so that they are essentially entombed on their shelves, and I doubt anyone comes along (or is allowed to come along) and disturb their slumber. But in these contexts I am a mere tourist, and when these facilities are closed to tourists they may open their treasures to others who have unrestricted access. I recall in particular that in one of the large and labyrinthine churches in Quito (I think it was the cathedral in the old town) there was a private specialty library on church and ecclesiastical topics; although these books, too, were behind glass, I enjoyed reading the suggestive titles of obscure tomes on mysticism and asceticism, church history and the liturgy.

The Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany.

The first time I traveled alone to Europe (I first visited Europe with one of my sisters), I visited the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, with many rare editions on display. In contrast to those private libraries where I have had full and unfettered access, the Herzog August Bibliothek and the Strahov Monastery Library in Prague were essentially museums. I remember that I felt quite jealous when a group was taken behind the velvet ropes at the Strahov library to see the collection up close, but despite my lack of access to the collection, I was glad that I visited the Strahov Library, because it was the occasion of one of the moments of travel when one comes to an almost ineffable insight into  the human condition. The Strahov library, in addition to books, had several cabinets of curiosities, as old as the library itself, and in looking into these antique displays I came to a visceral and intuitive understanding of the nature of the intellectual quest. Even within the restricted intellectual horizons on the past, earlier minds had reached outward in an attempt to gain a comprehensive conception of the world. 

The library in the Strahov Monastery in Prague, with its Theological Hall and Philosophical Hall

Perhaps the most imposing private library I have seen is that in El Escorial, the palace, church, and monastery built by Philip II. Like many of the famous sites I have visited in Europe, I had studied this building intensively before I actually saw it with my own eyes, and it is always a moment of great discovery mixed with satisfaction when one has a personal encounter with an iconic presence. In the library at El Escorial there was a display copy of Ramon Llull’s medieval work on logic and an enormous armillary sphere (impressive relics of Ptolemaic cosmology that they are). I had started that trip on the island of Majorca, where Raymon Llull is from, and where he now rests in a tomb, and in seeing his book displayed in El Escorial I felt that I had come full circle in that particular journey.

The library in El Escorial, Spain.

The Llull book made for an interesting visual display, as Llull was among the first to employ diagrams to lay out the decidable portions of logic. Llull’s book in the El Escorial library was open to one of these diagrams, which was as interesting to the eye as to the mind. A friend of mine at the time, who was an enthusiast of medieval logic, had talked a lot about Llull’s work and had insisted that I visit places significant in the life of Llull, which made my journey a kind of logical pilgrimage.

The tomb of Ramon Llull in Palma de Majorca.

Though a philosopher and a logician, Llull had also sought to travel to Muslim lands to try to convert Muslims during the time of the Crusades – he made his own logical pilgrimage of sorts. Llull continues to be venerated to this day. In fact, when I visited his tomb in Palma de Majorca it was surrounded by lit candles, and while I was there a young woman added a candle to their number. We spoke briefly, and I remembered being interested to note that the name, often transliterated as “Lully” but which is often written as Llull was pronounced locally with both double Ls as a “y” so that it sounded something like YOU-ya (but not exactly). I was quite touched that a philosopher and a logician should be venerated in popular memory, still the recipient of offerings hundreds of years after he died.

Few philosophers are so well memorialized, but there is an amusing passage from Bertrand Russell’s autobiography, when he recounts a time while visiting China he became very ill and almost died.

“I was told that the Chinese said that they would bury me by the Western Lake and build a shrine to my memory. I have some slight regret that this did not happen, as I might have become a god, which would have been very chic for an atheist.”