Not all imaginary libraries contain imaginary books.
Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
Tag Archives: Books & Reading
Even imaginary libraries can sink under the prestige and pompousness of academia.
Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
Lethe allows us oblivion of our former experience and happiness, but also of our prejudices and sorrows.
Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
since he had read the Word, the Word was now lodged inside him, even if he had not met the Author; that he had become the Book, the Word made flesh, through that little bit of the divine that the craft of reading allows to all those who seek to learn the secrets held by a page.
Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
In this “Closed Museum or Hidden Library” are many strange volumes and curious objects
Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
Reading and its rituals became acts of resistance; as the Italian psychologist Andrea Devoto noted, “everything could be treated as resistance because everything was prohibited.”
Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
The past (the tradition that leads to our electronic present) is, for the Web user, irrelevant, since all that counts is what is currently displayed. Compared to a book that betrays its age in its physical aspect, a text called up on the screen has no history. Electronic space is frontierless. Sites-that is to say, specific, self-defined homelands-are founded on it but neither limit nor possess it, like water on water. The Web is quasi-instantaneous; it occupies no time except the nightmare of a constant present. All surface and no volume, all present and no past, the Web aspires to be (advertises itself as) every user’s home, in which communication is possible with every other user at the speed of thought. That is its main characteristic: speed.
Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
We lend libraries the qualities of our hopes and nightmares; we believe we understand libraries conjured up from the shadows; we think of books that we feel should exist for our pleasure, and undertake the task of inventing them unconcerned about any threat of inaccuracy or foolishness, any terror of writer’s cramp or writer’s block, any constraints of time and space.
Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher]
If reading is a craft that allows us to remember the common experience of humankind, it follows that totalitarian governments will try to suppress the memory held by the page. Under such circumstances, the reader’s struggle is against oblivion.
Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher]
Every library both embraces and rejects. Every library is by definition the result of choice, and necessarily limited in its scope. And every choice excludes another, the choice not made. The act of reading parallels endlessly the act of censorship.
Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher]
