Travels with an open book on my lap

I am half asleep while cruising at 35,000 feet above the earth’s crust at a speed of 920 kilometers per hour. On my lap is Bruce Chatwin’s ‘Anatomy of Restlessness’, with my finger marking my progress. There is a slight chill from the air-conditioning, and I am lulled by that special calm of being alone among many, and of traveling while sitting still. I hear the sound of someone else turning a page.

Looking across at a clean-shaven man in his 40s holding a paperback with gem-stone studded fingers, I search his face for hints of what he might be reading… is it a murder mystery involving identical twins? Or the story of a family struggling to survive through a global epidemic? Or is he reading tips from a spiritual guru about meditation and success? Or perhaps, who knows, he might be seeing through the eyes of a dog, straining to hear sounds of laughter while sitting anxiously on the doormat?

In his film ‘Shirin’, Abbas Kiriostami evoked 85 minutes of an unseen film from the faces of its audience, comprising of a hundred and fifteen actresses sitting in a darkened and crowded theater. In the background, we hear sounds of the motion picture, complete with sound effects and music, depicting the 12th century legend of an Armenian princess falling tragically in love with a Persian nobleman. But we only see the image as it is reflected back on the surface of human faces, in shadows and blemishes and half smiles and teary eyes.

3., 4. & 5. Stills from ‘Shirin’ directed by Abbas Kiriostami

The effect is as hypnotic as it is mysterious, as open and vulnerable as it is private and curled secret. It made me think, what would it be to describe a book with the faces of its readers?

Jeanette Winterson’s mother is known to have said that the most dangerous thing about a book is that you don’t know what’s in it until it is too late. No doubt she found readers of books doubly dangerous, because with them you can’t even find out.

Thinking of the faces of readers, I was reminded of a passage from an essay by Michel Foucault called ‘Of Other Spaces’, where he writes “In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror.” Foucault uses this to elaborate on his concept of ‘heterotopias’ – being cultural or institutional spaces that are somehow ‘other’ (such as prisons, gardens, libraries and cemeteries), and how these removed spaces relate back to society. However, I think the analogy could also serve to describe the reader – who through the ‘otherness’ of a reflection returns to himself somehow changed.

It is because of this aspect of reading that I have always thought of libraries as points of departure and arrival rather than as store-houses and archives. For me, books are intricately linked to travel – not only across time and space, but more importantly across possibilities. Books have allowed me to imagine myself as different people, living multiple lives, and find empathy in each exposure. Books have given me the invaluable insight into what it might feel like if I were in someone else’s shoes. In this sense the library fits Jorge Luis Borges’s idea of a ‘garden of forking paths’ – because it contains, simultaneously, many worlds.

6. Main Reading Room, Mitchell Building, State Library of New South Wales. Photograph by Ivan Ives |  7. Young man reading in an airport waiting lounge

The most memorable reader I have encountered in literature, however, is Hanta, in Bohumil Hrabal’s ‘Too Loud a Solitude’. Hanta earns his living by compacting banned editions in a hydraulic press, but has made a habit of ‘saving’ books – which he smuggles back to his home that is now so crowded that he has no place to sleep, or distributes amongst his friends. But even when he is compacting the less fortunate books, he sanctifies the bales either by plastering the outside with some artistic reproduction, or by concealing in its innards an open volume of Kant, Erasmus or another one of his favorites. But as Hanta transforms books into trash, his mind leaps and trembles with every sentence that he unwittingly chances upon – sentences which he then pops into his mouth and sucks like a fruit drop, or sips like a liqueur, “until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.” Hanta goes on, “I huddle in the lee of my paper mountain like Adam in the bushes and pick up a book, and my eyes open panic-stricken on a world other than my own, because when I’m reading I’m somewhere completely different, I’m in the text, it’s amazing, I have to admit I’ve been dreaming, dreaming in a land of great beauty.” While Hanta always marvels at how far and how frequently his mind travels, he compares his brain to a mass of hydraulically compacted thoughts, a bale of ideas – and his head to a smooth, shiny Aladdin’s lamp. “How much more beautiful it must have been when the only place a thought could make its mark was the human brain, and anybody wanting to squelch it had to compact human heads, but even that wouldn’t have helped, because real thoughts come from the outside and travel with us like the noodle soup we take to work; in other words, inquisitors burn books in vain. If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself.”

8. Philippe Noiret as Hanta in a still from ‘Too Loud a Solitude’ directed by Véra Caïs 9. Still from ‘Colour of Pomegranates’ directed by Serjie Parajanov

At one point in the book, Hanta is given the task of compacting an entire library that has been shut down. Yet the loss here is not only the books… because a library means much more than the editions it keeps stacked on its shelves – just as a cinema means much more than the films projected onto its screens, and a park means much more than its trees and plants and fountains.

This point is perhaps best illustrated in Frederick Wiseman’s most recent documentary, “Ex Libris: New York Public Library.” For indeed, in the entire duration of the film, which is over 3 hours, there is hardly a single image that has a book as its exclusive subject. Rather, it is people that Wiseman is interested in, people who read books and people who use them.

A recurrent and extensively discussed theme in the film is what the mission of a library should be – and I was surprised how little emphasis was placed on the actual collection and storage of books. The priority, instead, was how a library could serve the public – not only by making its collection accessible, but also through education programs aimed to empower the public with the necessary skills to make best use of the available facilities. More than the halls stacked from floor to ceiling with books, therefore, Wiseman is interested in showing us the study centers and neighborhood hubs. He takes us to lectures and concerts organized by the library, and makes us a part of the discussions around immigrant services. We find that people use the library staff as temporary babysitters, and some rooms of the specialty branches are occupied by the homeless. On Fifth Avenue, Richard Dawkins gives a talk on the Enlightenment while in the Bronx unemployed community members huddle together for job-interview tips. Somewhere else, children are being taught how to read. One woman tries to access the library records to fill in some missing links in her family tree, while another man sitting on the adjacent table is deeply immersed in playing computer games.

What emerges from Wiseman’s method of aggregate observation is a portrait of an institution that is inseparably connected with the lives of the people it serves. Indeed, what is most striking in ‘Ex Libris’ are the faces recorded within the library premises, the faces of the public – the variety and number of these portraits in itself bears testimony to the continued relevance and importance of the institution in the city.

10. & 11., Stills from ‘Ex Libris’ directed by Frederick Wiseman

What differentiates a library from say the internet is that a library is characterized by physical interaction – with the books themselves, and with other people. Books are things: things to be touched and turned and opened. In Hrabal’s tale, the existential crisis for Hanta comes to a breaking point when he visits a new compacting plant with state of the art machinery, where it is stipulated that all the workers must wear blue rubber gloves so that they do not even touch the pages of the books that they destroy. Hanta watches with dismay as entire printings of books pass from the press straight to the pulper without anyone batting an eyelid: “No, they just went on working, pulling covers off books and tossing the bristling, horrified pages on the conveyor belt with the utmost calm and indifference.” It is this that leads Hanta to conclude that “neither the heavens are humane nor is any man with his head on his shoulders.”

The library is of course a great custodian of our collective knowledge and memory, but it is also very much a space of the present – it is where people meet, and where books pass from hand to hand like currency notes, circulating around the city and refracting into countless imaginations. And as with public transport, libraries offer a space in which even while traveling by yourself, you are never traveling alone.

My grandfather, when urged to write down his immense reserve of stories from which he would time to time recount a tale at tea-time, was puzzled – because he didn’t see the point. His stories were only worth telling when they had a context, when there were listeners. Indeed, stories without people are empty shells falling on hard ground; they are dead. The same holds true, I suppose, for a library.

Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that the meaning of a word is not to be found in any intrinsic definition, but in how that word is used. Meaning is always contemporaneous, always fluid, always growing and changing with each and every one of our daily exchanges. It is in this sense that Wittgenstein called language a ‘form of life’.

An institution like a library, too, is nothing if it is not used. Buildings and books and air planes and train compartments and courtrooms and public urinals are all dependent on the throb of people in order to stay alive, and stay relevant.

Abbas Kiriostami once joked that he liked slow films because he could have a nice nap in the air conditioned theater. During the summer, I like to visit the library for the same reason. But my favorite sleep is while traveling, with an open book on my lap.

12. ‘Chair Car’ by Edward Hopper