Libraries of the Mind

Some time ago, I reviewed in these pages a book also written by a French professor about how to talk about books that you have not read. William Marx is Professor of Literature at the Collège de France, and his point of departure is the story of Erich Auerbach, who was obliged to abandon his physical library when he fled to Istanbul to escape the Nazis. His book Mimesis is a history of narrative from Homer to Proust, and is based largely on his memory of past reading. Marx's thesis that we each have an invisible library in our minds – libraries are mental realities, while our minds are also libraries (Albert Schweitzer had very few of his books in Africa, and wrote Civilisation and Ethics largely drawing on his memory). My main library is still in our family home in Scotland, and I had the pleasure of spending time in it in January. Looking round the various sections, they are records of my interests and reading, as well as many expeditions to second-hand bookshops and gifts from my mentor Norman Cockburn, which I mentioned in the previous issue.

In my library, I have an inscribed copy of a book by Teilhard de Chardin that had previously belonged to Arnold Toynbee. His own library was evidently dispersed (it must have been quite extraordinary) and I remember in Waterfields in Oxford deciding not to buy his copy of Autobiography of a Yogi, as I already had my own. I do have a sense, as many people have remarked to me, of being a walking library myself, with many hidden recesses and connections that spontaneously emerge from the depths on fitting occasions. The three main chapters of this book expand on the idea of libraries of the mind, then examine the dark matter of literature, moving on to the world library and world literature. The phrase, man of letters, is more frequently used here in France than in English-speaking countries, and there the term intellectual is not derogatory…Members of the Académie Française are styled as immortals.

When we read a text, its meaning for us is translated into a mental form and potentially enhances our understanding of the topic at hand – then there are 'aha' moments or fresh insights that I tend to highlight as they imprint themselves on my mind. Some books read many years ago evoke subtle feelings when we encounter them again, such as Madame Bovary mentioned in this book, Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir, Tolstoy's Resurrection or Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Every reader will have their own list, but much of this is hidden away, and some books are more or less forgotten. The author also discusses classifications and catalogues from various epochs, as well as the impact of new creative works within a tradition. The 'dark matter' of literature includes lost works, fragments, transformed works (a painting by Courbet serves as an illustration), unrealised works, and neglected works; under the first, we can include many texts burnt by the Church, and the destruction of the library of Alexandria. A further theme is gestation, beautifully illustrated by stories from China. There is much more to say about this book, but I hope I have whetted your appetite to explore it for yourself.