Dark is a way and light is a place

Mindaddled by the repetitive strain of drafting and redrafting chapters of this thing, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the Lernaean beast, a dimestore Alcides - and I'm starting to think that I too must have been born on the fourth of the month, even if I've never understood why it is that good wine needs no bush and have always preferred to sell smoke instead - and marshalling bibliographies with all the command of a born follower, and wrestling with the twin demons of MS Word which, left at large to its own dark designs is sure to wreak terrible havoc with its unmotherfuckingbelievably malevolent widow-orphan control settings, enough to drive the orphaned Orestes to madness and the widowed Clytemnestra to find a new husband, and on the other side the darksome presence of those glassless, sightless Windows that threaten absolute annihilation at every turn, since "C" is as corrupt as a Russian politician and "D" is as uncooperative as a stoolie with three fingers left and a daughter in pre-school ("A" served the decree nisi a long time ago...I don't want to talk about it), I have now reached a state of absolute equilibrium - unlike the OS which only ever functioned by virtue of a kind of punctuated equilibrium that became radically destabilized whenever the Zephyr blew at sunset or whenever Jupiter entered Gemini or Endymion entered Diana if I might put it in those terms - and so, contrary to appearances, I feel completely relaxed as I type this and even if I come across as somewhat irked by minor annoyances I feel able to cope with everything the world can throw at me and if in the final analysis life is to be mindlessly, mindfully, into the city's iron heart, endured, and out again, upon the unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea and if most men live lives of quiet desperation then I'm grateful enough for this to be the case and let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if this be untrue since after all it's well said that abeunt studia in mores that is to say that they go away studies in morals of course so there's really nothing to fret about because all there is really is that and if there isn't that then there's this and if there isn't then that's all that matters when we forget ourselves to marble and even if that's not the case, I've never been much of a philosopher so where do we go from here if not back to where we started, that is to say to the point at which the author, doubting his own abilities, disgusted with his own laziness, profoundly frustrated and ruing the missed opportunities of the past three years, attempted to mitigate the charges of inadequacy and fuckwittedness by displacing his own stupidity onto inanimate objects, senseless systems and substandard software and shoddy solid state storage, just as now he strives for the captation (yes, that is a word) of the reader's benevolentiance (and so's that) by whipping himself into a frenzy just as any good heautontimorumenos would, and if this is in fact the case then surely he ought to take this opportunity to make his exit, pursued by a bear or no, and indeed this is exactly what I intend to do as soon as is humanly possible but as I do I can't help but append the following by way of codicil, to the effect that, to paraphrase a well-known author, even as I strain to give birth to a camel I bring forth only a gnat.

Ex libris, veritas

Recently, I've been thinking about books. Not so much books themselves, but their material existence, and what they mean to us. This comment by zakalwe got me thinking about the meaning of personal memories when they're invested in physical (and, yes, marketable) objects. And books have always been marketable: one only has to read Erasmus's comments on the Aldine press and its competitors in Festina lente to know that.

Books, however, hold a particular fascination for me (and for you, I'd wager). But does a love of literature equate to a love of books? I don't think so. I remember reading a novel (and I cannot now remember for the life of me what novel it was) where one of the characters, an elderly and crusty don, would fling his books about hither and thither with gay abandon, treating his first edition of Baudelaire just the same as any filthy yellow Livre de Poche. This sort of attitude I cannot countenance.

I recently took a look at Walter Benjamin's Illuminations; his musings on the unpacking of his book collection are well worth a read. Benjamin says, among other things:

"Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories"

Now, I don't own all that many books, and I would never consider myself a collector; certainly not in Benjamin's league, given that it took him a whole day to unpack his books. My personal library probably numbers around 200, but every single one has a special meaning for me, retains in itself a memory of when I first read it or where I first bought it. My edition of Jules Laforgue's poetry, for example, will forever be associated in my mind with the year I spent in Bordeaux in 1999-2000, despite the fact that I'll probably never read it. Benjamin's response to the inevitable question 'Have you read all these books?' -- 'Of course not. Why should I?'

Another two books I own that are particularly special to me, but not because of any personal memory invested in them, are two editions of Ovid's Heroides, one dated 1701, the other 1775. I bought these books - despite not being able to afford them - for personal reasons, and I don't regret doing so. If anyone's interested, the 1701 edition is a vellum bound Amsterdam edition of the Heinsius text, and the later one is a London edition (unbound) incorporating the annotations of Daniel Crispinus. Despite being intimately acquainted with these books, their feel, their smell, their textures, I always find something new to appreciate every time I pick them up.

In my everyday life I am now used to handling incunabula and books from the early history of printing. I especially love visiting the Warburg Library in London, which keeps its 16th-century editions in the open access bookstacks. That library is truly close to heaven. Still, I never quite shook that awestruck feeling, and I don't think I ever will. I have also been attending a paleography class for the last few weeks, and in that time I've handled a fair few medieval manuscripts, from a 12th-century Norman farming treatise to a handsomely illuminated Roman de la Rose. When I first started reading early printed books a few years ago, I was constantly in a state of anxiety: what if I accidentally tear a page, or deface a codex with an ill-anticipated sneeze? What about my responsibility to posterity? These days I'm more blasé about it, but I still occasionally catch myself drifting into a reverie, falling into one of those pockets of collective memory that tend to condense themselves, for whatever reason, in books.