I came across a lovely image the other day. I’m reading Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, a tale of a medieval monk and his young apprentice. The apprentice narrates how he once thought of books as separate and individual things, each distinct from the others. Then he discovered that some books contained parts of others; grew out of others; included, disputed, expounded and denied others.
He came away from this realization with an image of the library, dormant and silent in the daytime; but in the night, when the lights were out and the people were absent, the books whispered their stories to one another and communed among themselves.
I was really charmed by that thought. I spent a relatively large portion of my young life in libraries, and never entertained such a poetic image. I’m going to hold on to it for a long time.