“When I first went to work in Harvard’s Widener Library, I immediately made my first mistake: I tried to read the books. I quickly came to know the compulsive vertigo that Thomas Wolfe’s Eugene Gant, prowling the fictionalized Widener stacks, felt in the novel Of Time and the River.
Now he would prowl the stacks of the library at night, pulling books out of a thousand shelves and reading them like a madman. The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him made: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be. … He read insanely, by the hundreds, the thousands, the ten thousands. … [T]he thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever.
Thus begins Library, by Matthew Battles.
“As the reader gropes the stacks,” Battles continues after giving the quotation above, “the more elusive knowledge itself becomes. All that remains unknown seems to beckon from among the covers, between the lines.” And a bit farther on, this fine implied simile: “[T]he experience of the physicality of the book is strongest in the large libraries, where the accumulated weight of written words seems to exert a gravity all its own.”
On this note, one of my favorite quotations is from John Cowper Powys: “Life is short, and the number of books is appalling.” I had a piece of paper with that quote affixed to one of my bookcases for years, and was supposed to get it engraved on a brass plaque, but the project didn’t work out.
