Nuccio Ordine: "Los políticos matan la cultura porque desprecian la cultura, pero también porque le tienen miedo"

Entrevista de Marta Peirano para eldiario.es (17/12/2013).

"Afirmo, señores, que las reducciones propuestas en el presupuesto especial de las ciencias, las letras y las artes son doblemente perversas –argumentaba Victor Hugo frente a una propuesta ministerial de recortar fondos para la cultura en 1848–. Son insignificantes desde el punto de vista financiero y nocivas desde todos los demás puntos de vista".

Es una de las muchas voces que invoca el pensador italiano Nuccio Ordine en La utilidad de lo inútil (Acantilado), un "manifiesto" sobre la necesidad de la literatura (y especialmente de los clásicos) en tiempos de crisis y contra la desintegración de los museos, universidades y laboratorios. Aprovechamos su visita a Madrid para hablar de su libro y de las consecuencias del utilitarismo cultural, que devora también nuestras instituciones. 

Empecemos por el principio. ¿Qué es lo inútil?

En nuestra sociedad se considera útil sólo aquello que produce beneficios. Por esa lógica, la música, la literatura, el arte, las bibliotecas, los archivos de Estado, la arqueología, son todas cosas que se consideran inútiles porque no producen beneficios. Por eso no nos extraña que, cuando los gobiernos hacen recortes, comienzan por estas cosas inútiles sin darse cuenta de que, si eliminamos lo inútil, cortamos el futuro de la humanidad.

El drama que vivimos es ese: todos los ámbitos de nuestra vida están contaminados por la idea del beneficio y del lucro. Ya no educamos a las nuevas generaciones en el amor por el bien común, por el desinterés, por lo gratuito. Los educamos al revés, en el amor al dinero, a lo útil, al beneficio personal. Los profesores y rectores universitarios se han convertido en managers, y hablan un lenguaje contaminado por la lógica económica. Los estudiantes estudian para conseguir créditos y para pagar unas deudas. Este lenguaje no es neutro, demuestra que el lenguaje del lucro domina todas las capas de la vida. 

Dice usted que la cultura sólo puede ser gratuita.

Kant lo explica muy bien: si yo voy a un concierto, ¿en qué me beneficia? Mi amor por la música es un amor desinteresado y sólo ese amor me hace mejor. En una sociedad corrompida por la dictadura del beneficio, el conocimiento es la única forma de resistencia. Porque con el dinero se puede comprar cualquier cosa; parlamentarios, políticos, jueces, el éxito, la vida erótica. Sólo hay una cosa que no se compra con dinero: el conocimiento. Si soy un gran magnate y quiero comprar el saber, ni un cheque en blanco me valdría. El precio del saber es el esfuerzo personal. El conocimento no se compra, se conquista. 

Sin embargo, en su libro pone toda la responsabilidad sobre las instituciones. ¿No tenemos los individuos la obligación moral de ser inteligentes?

Las instituciones son los lugares donde esas cosas deberían ocurrir. Un joven tiene que comprender la importancia de la cultura y la misión de la escuela, de la educación, es esta: demostrarle que para entenderse a sí mismo y entender al mundo es necesario aprender. Y esto no ocurre porque los profesores están mal pagados, infravalorados y al mismo tiempo no hay recompensa para el que trabaja en la escuela. Es una paradoja que aún hoy en Italia hay profesores universitarios que tienen 50 años y siguen siendo interinos, no tienen un puesto de trabajo. La crítica de las instituciones es una crítica a cada uno de nosotros, pero las instituciones deben favorecer la excelencia. Cada vez que se reduce la financiación de las escuelas y universidades, acabamos con ella.

En su libro menciona que el poder tiene que destruir primero los artefactos y las instituciones culturales para poder establecer su régimen. ¿Los destruye porque los desprecia o porque les tiene miedo?

Los políticos matan la cultura porque desprecian la cultura, pero también porque le tienen miedo. Lo desprecian porque nuestra élite política es cada vez más ignorante, más inculta. Y por otra parte tienen miedo porque prefieren tener delante un público de personas que no estén capacitados para pensar con su propia cabeza y, por tanto, sean manipulables por los medios de masas, la televisión, las campañas electorales, toda una dimensión de engaños y mentiras que las personas reciben sin ser conscientes.

La ausencia de cultura es el abono necesario para que prospere la corrupción.

En Italia, el Tribunal de Cuentas que comprueba el presupuesto del Estado ha establecido que pagamos más o menos 150.000 millones al año de corrupción. Esto significa que, si un funcionario del Estado compra un vaso y el vaso compra un euro, nosotros pagamos un euro con 50 porque los 50 son el precio de la corrupción. Si pudiéramos eliminar la corrupción, ya no haría falta debilitar a la clase media y empobrecer cada vez más a los pobres. No haría falta eliminar los derechos fundamentales que hacen que el hombre sea digno de ser hombre.

La utilidad de lo inútil

La furia destructiva se abate sobre las cosas consideradas inútiles: el saqueo de la biblioteca real de Louyang efectuado por los Xiongnu en China, la quema de manuscritos paganos en Alejandría, decretada por el obispo Teófilo, los libros heréticos consumidos por las llamas de la Inquisición, las obras subversivas destruídas en los autos de fe escenificados por los nazis en Berlín, los espléndidos budas de Bamiyán arrasados por los talibanes en Afganistán o también los manuscritos de Sahel y las estatuas de Alfaruk en Tombuctú amenazadas por los yihadistas. Cosas inútiles e inermes, silenciosas e inofensivas, pero percibidas como un peligro por el simple hecho de existir.

Lee la introducción completa del manifiesto de Nuccio Ordine.

Con la excusa de la crisis se está expropiando la dignidad humana. Si corto los fondos para financiar a los enfermos, para ayudar a los discapacitados, si despido a padres que ya no pueden mantener a los suyos con un mínimo de dignidad, cometo un crímen gravísimo. Los derechos en los que se fundamenta la dignidad humana jamás se deberían tocar. Sería suficiente luchar contra la corrupción y esos 150.000 millones que ahorraríamos podrían con creces solucionar la crisis y mucho más.

Los gobiernos mienten cuando dicen que la crisis la pagamos todos: esta crisis no la pagan los bancos, no la pagan los banqueros, no la pagan los financieros. Esos reciben millones de euros de sueldo al año y aún finalizan su mandato con 15 millones de euros de finiquito. Luego se descubre que la empresa está en números rojos y que el directivo había firmado acuerdos para "privatizar" el dinero de la gente y llevárselo a casa. ¿Cómo podemos salir de este círculo vicioso? Creando y formando a jóvenes que sean conscientes, que sean capaces de defender el bien común. Jóvenes que no sean educados en el culto del beneficio y del dinero. Gente que se haya educado en una visión ética del mundo y que profesen el culto a la solidaridad humana. 

Pero la solidaridad no depende de sus beneficiarios, igual que la naturaleza de un crimen no se debe definir por sus víctimas. ¿Podemos aspirar a la solidaridad humana mientras aceptamos como sociedad la crueldad institucionalizada contra el resto de las especies? 

Absolutamente correcto: infligir dolor no es una cosa que atañe únicamente al género humano. Hay un fragmento bellísimo de Demócrito que, hablando con Hipócrates, le explica al padre de la medicina por qué se ríe. Porque Hipócrates pensaba que Demócrito estaba loco y por eso se reía. En cambio Demócrito se ríe por otra cosa. "Mira debajo de los hombres –le dice– ¿Qué hacen todo el día? Persiguen el dinero. ¿Y qué hacen con el dinero? Buscar más dinero. El dinero ya no es un medio, se ha convertido en el fin en sí mismo". Y añade que, para conseguir el dinero, el hombre "le corta las venas a la tierra".

Es lo que estamos viendo hoy en todo el mundo. En Italia, la Camorra (la mafia napolitana) ha construido una serie de depósitos subterráneos de residuos tóxicos. Y en aquellas zonas hay una alta tasa de enfermedad, de niños enfermos porque sus habitantes comen productos agrícolas contaminados por esos residuos tóxicos. Con este sistema estamos creando una manera de aniquilar cualquier cosa que atañe no sólo a la vida humana sino a la vida de nuestro sistema en sí. 

El Renacimiento y la Ilustración, con su desarrollo de conceptos ilustrados como el de los "derechos humanos" que definen nuestra sociedad actual, coinciden en el tiempo con las dos grandes olas de colonialismo europeo. Los monarcas e intelectuales ilustrados, junto con la Iglesia, disfrazaron la expropiación y el genocidio de misión civilizadora. ¿No está ocurriendo ahora lo mismo dentro de nuestras fronteras? ¿Son los pobres las nuevas colonias?

La comparación es muy buena. Si lees a algunos autores del Renacimiento, pocas voces han gritado contras las masacres llevadas a cabo en el Nuevo Mundo. Uno de estos es Bartolomé de las Casas. En Italia, Giordano Bruno describió a Colón y a sus marineros, no como marineros sedientos de saber sino como piratas sedientos de oro y de plata. Bruno dice: "Fueron a llevar una civilización, pero ellos ya tenían una civilización. Fueron a llevar una lengua, pero ellos ya tenían una lengua. Fueron a llevar una religión, pero ellos ya tenían una religión". 

Estos filósofos del Renacimiento dejaban entrever que la multiplicidad de las lenguas, de las religiones, de las filosofías, de los pueblos, de los colores de la piel, no son una limitación de la humanidad sino una riqueza de la humanidad. Lo que vemos hoy es propio de ese modelo horrible de masificación de hacer que seamos todos iguales. ¿Cuál es la ley que nos guía? La ley del beneficio.

Del país más perdido de Asia hasta el país más rico de Europa o Estados Unidos, comemos las mismas hamburguesas de McDonald's, vestimos la misma ropa y vemos las mismas tonterías en televisión. Esta ideología del beneficio es cada vez más global de lo que pudo ser en el pasado y los primeros ejemplos de la colonización son los ejemplos de cómo una suspuesta civilización pudo destruir una civilización que no conocía el beneficio y que vivía en un estado natural.

Tocqueville dice "hoy en América la gente busca las bellezas fáciles". ¿Qué quiere decir? Que no tengo tiempo de dedicarme a la lectura o para ir a una exposición de cuadros. El tiempo es dinero. Prefiero el libro que no me pide esfuerzos y aquellas manifestaciones culturales superficiales, mundanas, donde yo no aprendo nada porque no tengo tiempo para las cosas que requieren un compromiso personal. El riesgo de hoy está justamente en cultivar las bellezas fáciles; el bestseller, las películas que sólo son efectos especiales, todo lo que usamos para distraernos porque no queremos pensar, en lugar de ser estimulados a la reflexión.

¿Qué pasará cuando se privatice totalmente la enseñanza?

La educación, como la sanidad, es un pilar fundamental de una sociedad que sólo el Estado puede gestionar. Y la educación privada es una trampa, una de las peores cosas hacia las que nos podemos dirigir. Porque no podemos conocer el nivel de laicidad de una escuela privada, de una escuela católica, musulmana, de partido. Digo laicismo en el sentido de pluralidad, de construir personas libres de la ortodoxia. La escuela pública garantiza en primer lugar igualdad de los estudiantes. Quizá no ahora en la práctica pero es el único lugar donde se puede aspirar a este modelo. Hay universidades privadas excelentes pero están restringidas a los que tienen dinero. Tenemos que crear unas escuelas e universidades igual de excelentes con dinero del Estado para dar a todos la misma oportunidad. 

¿Se puede tener democracia sin escuela pública? 

Absolutamente no. Como no se puede tener democracia sin cultura, sin el respeto del otro y sin amor por el bien común. La formación de los jóvenes es importante porque es el futuro de la democracia. Si seguimos creando personas que piensan sólo en su beneficio personal, perderemos lentamente la democracia.

¿Lentamente?

Bueno, en realidad ya la hemos perdido. El proceso está ocurriendo ante nuestras narices pero no tenemos capacidad de reacción. 

¿Cuál es la cura de la infelicidad?

Adriano Olivetti [el singular empresario de las máquinas de escribir] decía: "Yo quiero una fábrica que no produzca sólo beneficios. Quiero una fábrica que produzca belleza y libertad. Porque serán la belleza y la libertad las que nos indiquen el camino para ser felices". Y una de las cosas que me ha llamado la atención leyendo a Montaigne es que Montaigne nos dice que no es poseer lo que nos hace felices, sino el gozar y el aprender a gozar. Si no apreciamos la belleza, si no sabemos apreciar el arte, la música, muy difícilmente aprenderemos a gozar. 

¿Nos ayudan los clásicos a encontrar en el infierno lo que no es infierno?

Leí ese pasaje del que hablas en un colegio donde muchos chicos eran hijos de padres encarcelados y les impactó mucho. Mi libro quiere ser una de esas pequeñas llamas de las que habla Calvino que pueden ayudar a ver el camino y hacernos entender lo que no es infierno del infierno en que vivimos para poder defenderlo. Este es el camino difícil que necesitamos escoger.

La tarea de los clásicos es despertar nuestra atención, estimular la reflexión, alimentar nuestra pasión, y ayudarnos a entendernos a nosotros mismos y el mundo que nos rodea. Y para desmontar una de las mayores tonterías que hoy perviven en nuestra sociedad: que para entender el presente hay que estudiar el presente. Para entender el presente hace falta el pasado. Sin pasado, no se puede entender el presente.

Giordano Bruno nos enseña que si la filosofía no se transforma en una manera de vida, no nos sirve para nada. Y Bruno escribió la última página de su filosofía en la hoguera del Campo de Fiore donde fue quemado por hereje, demostrando que se pueden quemar los libros pero no las ideas. La palabra de Bruno, la palabra de Montaigne, la palabra de Victor Hugo, nos hacen entender tantas cosas de nuestro presente porque algunos de nuestros grandes autores que han sabido exponer de manera sencilla lo que llevamos dentro y que no somos capaces de expresar. Y la literatura, la música, el arte son los únicos capaces de decir lo indecible y enseñarnos lo invisible.

Entrevista: eldiario.es

Object lesson: Why we need physical books (by William Giraldi at the New Republic magazine)

The committed bibliophile is cousin to the obsessive, an easily seduced accumulator frequently struck with frisson. Cram your home with books, and you’re lovingly called a collector; cram it with old newspapers, and you’re derisively called a hoarder. But be honest: The collector is a hoarder, too—a discriminating and noble-minded hoarder, perhaps, but a hoarder just the same.

Not long into George Gissing’s 1903 novel The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, you find a scene that no self-respecting bibliophile can fail to forget. In a small bookshop in London, the eponymous narrator spots an eight-volume first edition of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “To possess those clean-paged quartos,” Ryecroft says, “I would have sold my coat.” He doesn’t have the money on him, and so he returns across town to his flat to retrieve it. Too broke for a ride on an omnibus, and too impatient to wait, he twice more traverses the city on foot, back and forth between the bookshop and home, toting a ton of Gibbon. “My joy in the purchase I had made drove out every other thought. Except, indeed, of the weight. I had infinite energy but not much muscular strength, and the end of the last journey saw me upon a chair, perspiring, flaccid, aching—exultant!”

A pleasing vista onto the early twentieth-century life of one English writer, Gissing’s autobiographical novel is also an effusive homage to book love. “There were books of which I had passionate need,” says Ryecroft, “books more necessary to me than bodily nourishment. I could see them, of course, at the British Museum, but that was not at all the same thing as having and holding them”—to have and to hold—“my own property, on my own shelf.” In case you don’t quite take Ryecroft’s point, he later repeats “exultant” when recalling that afternoon of finding the Gibbon—“the exultant happiness.”¹ Exultation is, after all, exactly what the bibliophile feels most among his many treasures.

Those of us who dwell within mounts of books—a sierra of them in one room, an Everest in another; hulks in the kitchen, heaps in the hallway—can tell you that, in addition to the special bliss of having and holding them, it’s a hefty, crowded, inconvenient life that’s also an affront to the average bank account. (New hardback books are expensive to buy and economically neutered the second you do.) What’s more, your collection is a fatal Niagara if it falls. Every collector knows the probably apocryphal story of the nineteenth-century composer and bibliophile Charles-Valentin Alkan, found dead in an avalanche of his own books, crushed when his shelves upended onto him. Like the sex addict who suffers an aortic catastrophe during coitus, Alkan, at least, died smiling.

Although some see a distinction between the bibliophile and the collector, your Merriam Webster’s nicely insists that “bibliophile” means both one who loves books and one who collects them, which makes supreme sense to me—I can’t conceive of one who loves books but doesn’t collect them, or one who collects books but doesn’t love them. I employ “collector” as Robertson Davies does in his essay “Book Collecting”: not as a quester after books both rare and valuable, but as a gatherer of all books that match his interests. If you have lots of interests, you better have lots of rooms, and mighty floorboards to boot.²

What does it mean when what you own is essential to who you are? In our everyday grasp of owning things, we tag it materialism, consumerism, consumption. But I trust you’ll agree that the possession of books is not identical to the possession of shoes: Someone with a thousand books is someone you want to talk to; someone with a thousand shoes is someone you suspect of belonging to the Kardashian clan. Books are not objects in the same way that shoes are objects. This is what Milton means in his sublime “Areopagitica,” as necessary now as it was in 1644, when he asserted that “books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.” Potency of life, purest efficacy, living intellect: These are the world-enhancing elements you have in any well-made book worth reading.

For many of us, our book collections are, in at least one major way, tantamount to our children—they are manifestations of our identity, embodiments of our selfhood; they are a dynamic interior heftily externalized, a sensibility, a worldview defined and objectified. For readers, what they read is where they’ve been, and their collections are evidence of the trek. For writers, the personal library is the toolbox which contains the day’s necessary implements of construction—there’s no such thing as a skillful writer who is not also a dedicated reader—as well as a towering reminder of the task at hand: to build something worthy of being bound and occupying a space on those shelves, on all shelves. The personal library also heaves in reproach each time you’re tempted to grab the laptop and gypsy from one half-witted Web page to another. If you aren’t suspicious of a writer who isn’t a bibliophile, you should be.³

But you might have noticed: The book as a physical, cultural object is worth very little and losing value every quarter, it seems. As any urbanite knows, you’ll find them in boxes in alleyways on the first of every month—people can’t give them away. And now that more readers are choosing the electronic alternative, the illuminated convenience of downloading books and storing them in the troposphere where they remain accessible but simulated ... well, I’ll let James Salter pull the alarm. “A tide is coming in,” he wrote in 2012, “and the kingdom of books, with their white pages and endpapers, their promise of solitude and discovery, is in danger, after an existence of five hundred years, of being washed away. The physical possession of a book may become of little significance.”

One tide or another is always surging in on us—technology always makes certain modes of consumption obsolete, and for much of that obsolescence we can be grateful—but perhaps we should heed Salter’s anxiety here, because bibliophiles won’t be the only ones left denuded should the physical book be put to death. 

My own book collecting began in high school, at just about the time I was certain that literature would be my life—not an occupation but an existence. It’s been a back-aching, U-Hauling two decades because I’ve resided in a dozen homes across four different states. I’ve also inherited a book collection from a beloved mentor, a colossus that sits boxed and bulging in my grandparents’ basement in New Jersey—I can’t wedge any more books into our Boston home without inciting my spouse and children to mutiny. In the mid-’90s, when my grandparents lived near the Raritan River, I stored several hundred titles in a first-floor bedroom, and when the river swallowed half the town one year, all those books were swallowed, too. After the waters retreated, I laid the books out in the sun on the sidewalk, cataloging my losses in a kind of requiem.⁴ In 1941, Rose Macaulay wrote beautifully about losing her library, her whole apartment, in the Blitz—“a drift of loose, scorched pages fallen through three floors to street-level, and there lying sodden in a mass of wreckage smelling of mortality”—and I’ve never read that essay without blurred vision.

When a bibliophile reads a classic, he tends to remember most vividly those portions that might by chance speak to an ardor for books—he’s pleased to find some kinship with the greats—and so some of my most dominant memories of Rousseau’s Confessions or Boswell’s Life of Johnsonor Waugh’s A Handful of Dust or Woolf’s Night and Day or Orwell’s Coming Up for Air happen to be those swaths of prose which confirm my own hunch that a life with books is more meaningful than a life without books. As a child reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, I was spun around by that mention of Captain Nemo’s personal library aboard his vessel, all 12,000 tomes of it. The narrator, Pierre Aronnax, comments that Nemo must have “six or seven thousand volumes,” and Nemo replies, “Twelve thousand, M. Aronnax. These are the only ties which bind me to the earth.” If Nemo indeed owned 12,000 books, I knew, the way a beast knows the coming season, that I wanted 12,000, too.

One collects books for reasons that are, of course, acutely personal, but I have a memory of the afternoon when I was shown how others perceive the flexing brawn of a book collection. At 19 years old, in surrender from an unkillable Northeast winter, I moved to South Carolina, and one day a police officer arrived at my apartment to question me about cash that had been thieved from someone with whom I’d spent a night—she thought the thief was me and not, as it turned out, her roommate. There were prints on the box from which the cash had been stolen, and the officer asked if I’d be willing to go to the station to have my own prints taken. Of course I would, I said, and as I asked for driving directions, he squinted at the bookshelves. “All those books,” he said, and then asked the infamous cliché of a question, the question that occurs only to nonreaders: “You read all those books?” I told him that I’d read fewer than half—the truth was that I’d read fewer than half of half—and he said, “Well clearly the thief’s not you. No one smart enough to read all those books is dumb enough to steal cash from such a pretty gal.” And then he began walking his fingertips along the spines as if he’d just realized that the books might confer on him some magical capacity.⁵

He’d have been right about the capacity but wrong about the magic. A life with books is a life of pleasure, yes, but also a life of work. Not just the work of lugging their heft each time you move, but the work of reading them, the work of discernment, of accepting the loquacity of the world’s bliss and hurt and boredom, of welcoming both small and seismic shifts to your selfhood, of attempting to earn those intimations of insight that force the world briefly into focus. That’s the reason the cop was wrong in thinking that readers are smart by default: Dedicated readers are precisely those who understand the Socratic inkling that they aren’t smart enough, will never be smart enough—the wise are wise only insofar as they know that they know nothing. In other words: Someone with all the answers has no use for books. Anthony Burgess once suggested that “book” is an acronym for “Box Of Organized Knowledge,” and the collector is pantingly desperate for proximity to that knowledge—he wants to be buffeted, bracketed, bulletproofed by books. Leigh Hunt wrote of literally walling himself in with his collection: “I entrench myself in my books equally against sorrow and the weather. If the wind comes through a passage, I look about to see how I can fence it off by a better disposition of my movables. ... When I speak of being in contact with my books, I mean it literally. I like to lean my head against them.”

The physicality of the book, the sensuality of it—Oliver Wendell Holmes called his collection “my literary harem”—the book as a body that permits you to open it, insert your face between its covers and breathe, to delve into its essence, its offer of reciprocity, of intercourse—this is what many of us seek in the book as object. In his bantam essay on book love, Anatole France starts off swinging: “There is no true love without some sensuality. One is not happy in books unless one loves to caress them.”⁶ There was little that escaped the Updikian caress, and he wrote more than once about the pleasures and peculiarities of book collecting. In an essay called “The Unread Book Route,” about A History of Japan to 1334, Updike wrote: “The physical presence of this book, so substantial, so fresh, the edges so trim, the type so tasty, reawakens in me, like a Proustian talisman, the emotions I experienced when, in my youth, I ordered it.” Leave it to the unerringly sensual and curious Updike to a) refer to book type as “tasty,” and b) think as a youth that he needed to know something about Japan prior to 1334.

Updike’s point about the Proustian talisman is a crucial one for bibliophiles: Their collections are not only proof of their evolution but monuments to their past, fragrant and visual stimulators of recall. Gissing’s hero Ryecroft says just that: “I know every book of mine by its scent, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.” Across a collector’s bookshelves, upright and alert like uniformed sentinels, are segments of his personal history, segments that he needs to summon in order to ascertain himself fully, which is part of his motive for reading books in the first place—whatever else it is, a life with books is incentive to remember, and in remembering, understand. Borges said: “My father’s library was the capital event in my life. The truth is that I have never left it.” Borges’s own books, then, are both collection and connection, an emotional umbilical to his father. In his autobiography The Words, Sartre spends several pages of the first chapter recalling his grandfather’s book love and the sanctity of the old man’s library, how as a boy Sartre secretly touched those much revered tomes, “to honor my hands with their dust,” and in that honoring, the honing of affection for his dear grandfather.⁷

Since bibliophiles are happy to acknowledge the absurdity, the obese impracticality of gathering more books than there are days to read them, one’s collection must be about more than remembering—it must be about expectation also.⁸ Your personal library, swollen and hulking about you, is the promise of betterment and pleasure to come, a giddy anticipation, a reminder of the joyous work left to do, a prompt for those places to which your intellect and imagination want to roam. This is how the nonreader’s question Have you read all these books? manages to miss the point. The tense is all wrong: Not have you read all, but will you read all, to which, by the way, the bibliophile’s answer must still be no. Agonizingly aware of the human lifespan, the collector’s intention is not to read them all, but, as E.M. Forster shares in his essay “My Library,” simply to sit with them, “aware that they, with their accumulated wisdom and charm, are waiting to be used”—although, as Forster knows, books don’t have to be used in order to be useful.⁹

One of the most imperishable notions ever set down about a personal library can be found inside Sven Birkerts’s essay “Notes from a Confession.” Birkerts speaks of “that kind of reading which is just looking at books,” of the “expectant tranquility” of sitting before his library: “Just to see my books, to note their presence, their proximity to other books, fills me with a sense of futurity.” Expectant tranquility and sense of futurity—those are what the noncollector and what the downloader of e-books does not experience, because only an enveloping presence permits them.

Forgoing physicality, readers of e-books defraud themselves of the communion which emerges from that physicality. Because if Max Frisch is correct in defining technology as “the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it,” then one might argue that we aren’t really experiencing a novel or poems on our e-readers. We might be reading them—although I find that an e-reader’s scrolling and swiping are invitations to skim, not to read—but fully experiencing them is something else altogether.

You scroll and swipe and click your way through your life, scanning screens for information and interruption, screens that force you into a want of rapidity. Why you’d welcome another screen in your life, another enticement to rapidity and diversion, is a question you might ask yourself.Paradise Lost will not put up with rapidity and diversion, and that is exactly why, for some of us, a physical book will always be superior reading, because it allows you to be alone with yourself, to sit in solidarity with yourself, in silence, in solitude, in the necessary sensitivity that fosters development and imagination. A physical book makes it possible to fend off the nausea roused by the electronic despotism we’ve let into our lives—it doesn’t permit blinking, swiping, scrolling, popping-up impediments to your concentration, doesn’t confront it with a responsive screen trying to sell you things you don’t need. On a train with only a paperback of Paradise Lost, you are forced into either an attempt at understanding and enjoyment or else an uninterrupted stare out your window. Your Kindle Fire is so named because Amazon understands that we Americans rather enjoy the hot oppression of endless choices, the arson of our calm. At the first signs of Milton’s difficulty, you can nix the whole excursion and romp around with a clattering of apps.

Let me pre-empt certain mumbles by saying that I can recognize the value of electronic reading and would not wish it away. The e-reader is a godsend to those travelers who want to carry all eight volumes of Gibbon with them. (Although you can question if a traveler would really make use of Gibbon’s dreadnought while traipsing through foreign climes. Aldous Huxley has a funny essay called “Books for the Journey” in which he writes: “Thick tomes have traveled with me for thousands of kilometers across the face of Europe and have returned with their secrets unviolated.”) E-books have aided an infirm publishing industry while offering an inexpensive option to those who would never spend $35 on a hardback. The e-reader is also sometimes the only way to have a book if you don’t live near a library and if the postal carrier has trouble reaching your wilderness grot.

At my alma mater recently I gave a lecture on the importance of literature in this digital age, and I might have half-earnestly referred to the Internet as an insane asylum where the misanthropic and lonesome go to die, because afterward a 90-year-old woman three-pronged her way to the podium to give me a deserved lashing. Without the Internet, she said, without e-books blaring forth from an illuminated screen, she wouldn’t be able to read at all, such was the condition of her eyesight after 85 years of reading. How does the cyberskeptic counter that? He doesn’t.

You can easily locate the science that says we read more comprehensively when we read on paper, the neurological data that shows how our memories are motivated, soldered by the tactile, how we learn most fruitfully when our senses are stroked, but those are not what truly vex the bibliophile. The point, like so many literary points worth emphasizing, is an aesthetic one—books are beautiful. What you hear in the above anxiety by James Salter is not really a condemnation of e-readers, but an anxiety about a loss of beauty. Robertson Davies got it right when he wrote this about beautiful editions of good books: “We value beauty and we value associations, and I do not think we should be sneered at because we like our heroes to be appropriately dressed.” Gissing’s narrator in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft admits: “The joy of reading the Decline and Fall in that fine type! The page was appropriate to the dignity of the subject; the mere sight of it tuned one’s mind.” The dignity of the subject—remember that formulation, and savor the excellence of that last metaphor, one’s mind tuned by the fine type of such sweet pages.

I feel for Salter’s anxiety, and I agree with Burgess when he wrote, commenting on those delectable editions produced by The Folio Society in London: “We have to relearn pride in books as objects lovely in themselves.” But allow me to assure you of this truth: Like the bicycle, the book is a perfect invention, and perfection dies very, very hard. The car hasn’t murdered the bike, and the Web won’t murder the book. There are innumerable readers for whom the collecting of physical books will remain forever essential to our selfhoods, to our savoring of pleasure and attempted acquisition of wisdom, to our emotional links with our past and our psychological apprehension of others—essential not just as extensions of our identities but as embodiments of those identities. Books, like love, make life worth living.

¹

I can’t help noticing that “exultation” is the term marshaled by Leigh Hunt in his 1823 bibliophilic essay “My Books,” and also by Somerset Maugham in his novel The Razor’s Edge, when he writes of one character’s leisure with a copy of Spinoza.

²

Eugene Goodheart wrote this in his memoir Confessions of a Secular Jew: “My personal library is an accumulation rather than a collection, which means I never quite know where a book I need is. I begin looking for a book I had misplaced, but to no avail. Another book catches my eye. … I pick it up and peruse it”—and that’s called serendipity. The same rewarding surprise can happen when you grab the big red copy of your Merriam Webster’s instead of seeking your definition online, just as you can discover the gem you didn’t know you needed every time you choose a brick-and-mortar bookshop over Amazon.

³

It’s not hard to nod along with Leigh Hunt when he admits: “I love an author the more for having been himself a lover of books.” It’s really the rudimentary qualification every reader should demand of a writer.

⁴

For weeks after that flood I walked around with a hole in my chest. I’d welcome a hack with a scalpel if only it were possible to excise that memory. I made a list of the deceased copies and vowed to replace every last one, a vow I’m still fulfilling.

⁵

Before the officer left that day, I told him to choose a book from my shelf, my gift to him for his interest and his kindness toward me, and he chose a paperback copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther, pronouncing Goethe’s name “goeth,” as in “the sun goeth down.” For two decades I’ve wondered what this officer of the peace thought of the novel that in the late eighteenth century sent a shockwave of suicides across Deutschland.

⁶

France also has this to say to those negligent readers who don’t esteem physical books as works of art: “You have no fire and no joy, and you will never know the delight of passing trembling fingers over the delicious grain of a morocco-bound volume.”

⁷

You see, then, what Anatole Broyard means when he dubs the personal library “an ancestral portrait”—this is exactly what Borges and Sartre were getting at.

⁸

Here’s Susan Sontag, in her novel The Volcano Lover, writing about art, but any bibliophile will feel a tremor of recognition: “A great private collection is a material concentrate that continually stimulates, that overexcites. Not only because it can always be added to, but because it is already too much. The collector’s need is precisely for excess, for surfeit, for profusion. It’s too much—and it’s just enough for me. … A collection is always more than is necessary.”

⁹

I’m reminded that the human lifespan is also part of Harold Bloom’s argument for why one should read only the best books. There’s not time enough for junk. Paradise Lost alone takes half a lifetime of rereading to understand fully. This is what Nabokov means by: “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.”

William Giraldi is the author of the novels Busy Monsters and Hold the Dark.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121560/bibliophiles-defense-physical-books

Hi ha qui es queixa de l'excés d'afecte. Més aviat, jo em queixaria del petó burocràtic, de l'abraçada perquè toca i d'aquella tendresa dispensada amb el rigor del deure. 

(06/IV/2015)