I have been thinking about libraries. Many historic libraries begin with donations of personal collections. As Walter Benjamin understands, in his essay “Unpacking My Library,” the collector is present in each book in his collection. He writes, “Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them”. These historical libraries, which owe their legacy to the private collections Benjamin speaks of, contain elements of their founding members. The hallmarks of original collectors are present in a cumulative understanding of the libraries development over time, as it grows out from its original core. Public libraries must acknowledge the original collection while simultaneously shaping its services around the temporally relevant societal requirements. These forces work to change the experience of reading in the library, as each book is kept in the company of the library’s original collector.
As readers, we cultivate the meaning of a library through the company each book we choose is keptin. This selection process brings the reader into communion with the original collector, who is present in a historically cumulative understanding of this collection, or as Matthew. Battles writes in Libraries: An Unquiet History, “But the library- especially one so vast- is no mere cabinet of curiosities; it’s a world, complete and uncomplete, and its filled with secrets”. In this world, the illusive idea of knowledge in totality is debunked. We can only hope to begin navigating the breadth of the stacks by exploring the library’s privilege of certain types of materials. This privilege, constructed by the historical social context of the library, contains the legacy of the original collector’s preferences. In this way, as we comply with the constructed argument of the library, we learn from its original collector, and perpetuate a doctrine which has been handed down to us systematically through time.
You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.
-Woody Allen
Just finished Joan Didio
n's Play it as it Lays. Evasive and spare, Didion is a surgeon, cutting into a haunting picture of 1970's America. The plot is submerged, without cause or effect, and whiteness pervades the narrator's consciousness; she seems thirsty for obliteration from the material and corporeal. Didion writes of her intention to write a novel "“a novel so elliptical and fast that it would be over before you noticed it, a novel so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page at all....white space. Empty space...."
Clarissa had a theory in those days . . . that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death . . . perhaps—perhaps.
-Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
