Comfortable Chaos

Any person who owns several tens of thousands of books is faced with an inescapable problem: their classification. For if the comfortable chaos of a few hundred books does not prevent their owner (and their owner alone!) from finding his or her way around them, the ordering of ten or twenty thousand books requires one to have a retrieval system. In fact, that is usually the drift of the second question invariably put by the “innocent” visitor – the first ­­one being: “And have you read them all?” A “fellow conspirator” on the other hand, the moment I leave the room, will look over the shelves, trying to work out the principle, and when I come back in, will check—with not a little pride—whether his or her hypothesis is correct. But even before that, comes the problem of their physical accommodation.  For books, unlike foodstuffs or other articles, can’t just sit in cardboard boxes or live in piles. These are no more than temporary solutions, which make it impossible to use them. If they are going to be read, they have to be arranged on shelves in a way that makes them retrievable. And bookshelves take up space, even if whole rooms—not just their walls—can be devoted to them, as in university libraries.  The ideal, of course, would be to have a purpose-built library, adapted to the books one owns, and reflecting the image one has of it.

Quotation from: Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet Trans. Sian Reynolds. MacLehose Press, London. 2008,

Insomnia

Between two and three o’clock in the morning was also the time when dreams refused to be drowned, but when the heart slowed in its beating, packed in sand, heavy, like a sack of pipis brought in with the tide and stranded when the tide went out, as tides do, hanging placards on the shore for the comfort of those who haunt beaches who keep returning again and again to make sure what the tide is up to, what gifts it has strewn on the sand, whether it is at home, in bed, asleep, complaining, raging, raking up the past or the dead, letting the matter rest, avoiding the issue, or whether it had got tired of sitting brooding on the cheerless hearth and has put on its green cloak and gone out to do destruction—murder or love…

Quotation: Scented Gardens for the Blind. Janet Frame, 1963

Philosophers Hate Life

‘You are not sufficiently democratic,’ answered the policeman, but you were right when you said just now that our ordinary treatment of the poor animal was a pretty brutal business. I tell you I am sometimes sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a war upon the ignorant and the desperate.  

We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals.  We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that the dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. 

Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential idea of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. 

Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage.  Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seem to them to be lesser lives.  But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other peoples.

Quotation from The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton, 1908