In Another Beauty (trans. Clare Cavanagh, 2000), the late Adam Zagajewski revisits the library at his alma mater, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and calls it a “botanical garden of ideas,” a metaphor worthy of the librarian Borges. I briefly visited the Jagiellonka, as it’s known, in 2012 while in Poland for a wedding. My companion was a voluble Englishman hungover from the previous night’s reception. In Poland, weddings are celebrated with at least two receptions, and the second round was coming up that evening. He had little interest in the 6.7 million volumes in the collection, but indulged me while seeing nothing of interest in walls of books written in languages he couldn’t read. One curious and unlikely memory: on a table I saw a Polish translation of a novel by Sinclair Lewis. Zagajewski writes:
“It was a
treasure trove and only a wall divided it from the busy street. A library—a vast,
proud library—embodies the imagination as such, the spirit and the intellect of
all humanity. Thoughts wait here for future readers.”
Call me a
hopeless romantic but that’s how I think of libraries (and the rare good
bookstore). I know people who wilt at the sight of so many books. Such a quantity
of compacted knowledge and beauty is an affront, whereas I find it reassuring,
an endorsement of our sorry species. Libraries are welcoming. I remember the
thrill of first entering a university library, which proved more lastingly
valuable than any class I would attend. It was an autodidact's utopia and felt like home.
Zagajewski concludes the library passage in his memoir like this:
“Here I studied Plato and Heraclitus, the mysteries of the Middle Ages, here I read inspired Englishmen, witty Frenchmen, and morose Germans. As well as my own countrymen. And even the somber, bearded Russians. And forbidden books, which could be acquired only with the dean’s permission. That’s how I managed to get ahold of Czesław Miłosz’s poetry and essays.”
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In 1970, when I was ten, my city (Bell Gardens, California) built a new state-of-the-art library — right across the street from my house. (It was then that I knew that I was the favorite of the gods. The vicissitudes of life have since led me to revise that reckless assumption, but then I no longer live across the street from a library.) Every time I walked through the building’s doors (five or six times a day, probably), I sent up a silent thanks to Richard M. Nixon, whose name was prominently displayed on the dedication plaque by the entrance, even though he really had nothing to do with the project. (He had other things on his mind in those days — boy, did he.)
I practically lived in that library, and I knew every shelf of the large children’s section intimately; I could have drawn a quite accurate map of the layout from memory (I still can), with large arrows pointing to the location of my favorite books, many of which I checked out repeatedly and read over and over again. I can only agree with Borges, who said that he imagined heaven as a library.
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