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Authors: Keith Miller
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entire philosophy.
Scripts in which each letter stood for a notion, so the writing dictated
thought patterns rather than words. Scripts that had no meaning at all, or that
started out meaningfully but then, as the author was caught up in the physical
act of writing, became relationships of lines and shapes on paper, beautiful
and abstract. Private scripts, the authors long dead, so the script stood
isolated, unreadable, precious nonetheless. Rainforest scripts of samara and
turaco crest. Marine scripts of shark tooth and sand dollar. I passed through
rooms of books the size of doors, each cover the death of an eland, and rooms
of books dainty as ladybirds. Books written on communion wafers, grains of
rice, sheets of ice.
Books are hiding places. I found books grangerized to twice their
normal thickness by pressed flowers, letters, panties, snapshots. And of course
books are palimpsests. Some books had been read by so many scholars they were
entirely underlined, in blue pencil, ballpoint, fountain pen. Some ancient
pages were black with notes scribbled in a hundred hands around the margins,
between the lines, across the print itself, the text subsumed beneath a lichen
of commentary.
I passed through caverns of drifting paper that fell like
rectangular snowflakes. Caverns of dark pools, where books swam like fish, all
gills and fins. Empty caverns of dream books, the beautiful books imagined by
authors who died too young to write them. Many rooms had sofas or plump chairs or
cushions piled on carpets, many were provided with thermoses of coffee and
cocoa, bottles of wine, bowls of fruit and nuts and baked goods. It was the
most wonderful place in the world.
In the Library of Alexandria, time lay between leather bindings. Drinking
cocoa, eating fruit and cookies, I wandered through the fabulous chambers.
Several times, I saw a librarian’s candle and swiftly snuffed my own and moved
farther in. Though occasionally I was forced to plunge into a book, I struggled
to remain on the surface, skimming titles, trying to gather the layout of the
place. When I first entered it, saw the books scattered around the room and
read the titles ranged in no alphabetical order, I thought there was no
pattern, that the library was just a big dustbin for books, and this both
pleased and alarmed me, but as I moved deeper, I began to sense a different
paradigm at work. The library was vast, and in those initial days I entered
only a smattering of the rooms, but even so I began to feel my way into its order.
When you are unable to remember a name, some character in a book,
say, you can nevertheless smell it, taste it, as if words have auras. So you
know it begins with an S or a Z, is scented like cinnamon, colored like lapis
lazuli, chimes with sheen or serene. You know how long the word is, its curly
shape, whether it was recto or verso, and its placement on the page, but the
sound will not trip off the tongue. Just so, slipping through those rooms, I
began to sense the books I might discover next, as if the halos about them were
other books. I could not have stated precisely my reasons, but holding a volume
in a chamber I could have said that the surrounding books had to do with dreams
of flying, and that if I entered the chamber ahead of me I might find books on
angels, and the chamber to my right might contain books on the phoenix and
quetzalcoatl.
Thus, as I moved through the library, I had the sensation that I was
encountering the books of my childhood, books forgotten for decades, titles on
the tip of my tongue. And indeed I did encounter, from time to time, books I’d
read so long ago they seemed myths, and books I’d been searching for my whole
life, upon which I pounced like an urchin upon coconut candy, and books that
had been rumors in other books, their very existence putative, like sightings
of basilisks or unicorns. But most of the books were strange and new. When I
moved through the libraries and collections and bookstores of
Scripts in which each letter stood for a notion, so the writing dictated
thought patterns rather than words. Scripts that had no meaning at all, or that
started out meaningfully but then, as the author was caught up in the physical
act of writing, became relationships of lines and shapes on paper, beautiful
and abstract. Private scripts, the authors long dead, so the script stood
isolated, unreadable, precious nonetheless. Rainforest scripts of samara and
turaco crest. Marine scripts of shark tooth and sand dollar. I passed through
rooms of books the size of doors, each cover the death of an eland, and rooms
of books dainty as ladybirds. Books written on communion wafers, grains of
rice, sheets of ice.
Books are hiding places. I found books grangerized to twice their
normal thickness by pressed flowers, letters, panties, snapshots. And of course
books are palimpsests. Some books had been read by so many scholars they were
entirely underlined, in blue pencil, ballpoint, fountain pen. Some ancient
pages were black with notes scribbled in a hundred hands around the margins,
between the lines, across the print itself, the text subsumed beneath a lichen
of commentary.
I passed through caverns of drifting paper that fell like
rectangular snowflakes. Caverns of dark pools, where books swam like fish, all
gills and fins. Empty caverns of dream books, the beautiful books imagined by
authors who died too young to write them. Many rooms had sofas or plump chairs or
cushions piled on carpets, many were provided with thermoses of coffee and
cocoa, bottles of wine, bowls of fruit and nuts and baked goods. It was the
most wonderful place in the world.
In the Library of Alexandria, time lay between leather bindings. Drinking
cocoa, eating fruit and cookies, I wandered through the fabulous chambers.
Several times, I saw a librarian’s candle and swiftly snuffed my own and moved
farther in. Though occasionally I was forced to plunge into a book, I struggled
to remain on the surface, skimming titles, trying to gather the layout of the
place. When I first entered it, saw the books scattered around the room and
read the titles ranged in no alphabetical order, I thought there was no
pattern, that the library was just a big dustbin for books, and this both
pleased and alarmed me, but as I moved deeper, I began to sense a different
paradigm at work. The library was vast, and in those initial days I entered
only a smattering of the rooms, but even so I began to feel my way into its order.
When you are unable to remember a name, some character in a book,
say, you can nevertheless smell it, taste it, as if words have auras. So you
know it begins with an S or a Z, is scented like cinnamon, colored like lapis
lazuli, chimes with sheen or serene. You know how long the word is, its curly
shape, whether it was recto or verso, and its placement on the page, but the
sound will not trip off the tongue. Just so, slipping through those rooms, I
began to sense the books I might discover next, as if the halos about them were
other books. I could not have stated precisely my reasons, but holding a volume
in a chamber I could have said that the surrounding books had to do with dreams
of flying, and that if I entered the chamber ahead of me I might find books on
angels, and the chamber to my right might contain books on the phoenix and
quetzalcoatl.
Thus, as I moved through the library, I had the sensation that I was
encountering the books of my childhood, books forgotten for decades, titles on
the tip of my tongue. And indeed I did encounter, from time to time, books I’d
read so long ago they seemed myths, and books I’d been searching for my whole
life, upon which I pounced like an urchin upon coconut candy, and books that
had been rumors in other books, their very existence putative, like sightings
of basilisks or unicorns. But most of the books were strange and new. When I
moved through the libraries and collections and bookstores of
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