A Fraternity of Dreamers
“There is no syllable one can speak that is not filled with tenderness and terror, that is not, in one of those languages, the mighty name of a god.”
—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” (1941)
“Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page…He’ll have a world all to himself…without anyone.”
—Rod Serling, “Time Enough at Last,” The Twilight Zone (1959)
When entering a huge library—whether its rows of books are organized under a triumphant dome, or they’re encased within some sort of vaguely Scandinavian structure that’s all glass and light, or they simply line dusty back corridors—I must confess that I’m often overwhelmed with a massive surge of anxiety. One must be clear about the nature of this fear—it’s not from some innate dislike of libraries, the opposite actually. The nature of my trepidation is very exact, though as far as I know there’s no English word for it (it seems like some sort of sentiment that the Germans might have an untranslatable phrase for). This fear concerns the manner in which the enormity of a library’s collection forces me to confront the sheer magnitude of all that I don’t know, all that I will never know, all that I can never know. When walking into the red-brick modernist hanger of the British Library, which houses all of those brittle books within a futuristic glass cube that looks like a robot’s heart, or the neo-classical Library of Congress with its green patina roof, or Pittsburgh’s large granite Carnegie Library main branch smoked dark with decades of mill exhaust and kept guard by a bronze statue of William Shakespeare, my existential angst is the same. If I start to roughly estimate the number of books per row, the number of rows per room, the number of rooms per floor, my readerly existential angst can become severe. This symptom can even be present in smaller libraries; I felt it alike in the small-town library of Washington, Penn., on Lincoln Avenue and in the single room of the Southeast Library of Washington D.C. on Pennsylvania Avenue. Intrinsic to my fear are those intimations of mortality whereby even a comparatively small collection must make me confront the fact that in a limited and hopefully not-too-short life I will never be able to read even a substantial fraction of that which has been written. All those novels, poems, and plays; all those sentiments, thoughts, emotions, dreams, wishes, aspirations, desires, and connections—completely inaccessible because of the sheer fact of finitude.
Another clarification should be in order—my fear isn’t’s classic and delicious campus satire in which a group of academics play a particularly cruel game, as academics are apt to do, that asks participants to name a venerable book they’re expected to have read but have never opened. Higher point-values are awarded the more canonical a text is; what the neophytes don’t understand is that the trick is to mention something standard enough that they still can get the points for having not read it (like ’s ) but not so standard that they’ll look like an idiot for having never read it. One character—a recently hired English professor—is foolish enough to admit that he skipped in high school. The other academics are stunned into silence. His character is later denied tenure. So, at the risk of making the same error, I’ll lay it out and admit to any number of books that the rest of you have probably read, but that I only have a glancing Wikipedia familiarity with: ’s ’s
