We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.Īfter newsletter promotion Vallejo’s methodology is to dart back and forth between the ancient and modern worlds and between public history and personal moments For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. He composed poems featuring well-known characters from Troy, Ithaca, Athens and Byzantium and contemplated the way that homosexuality, by then such a disgraced and disgraceful affair, had once been a rich thread in the ancient world. By night, though, Cavafy was a book-haunted man, walking the back streets of Alexandria through which the vanished great library thrummed and whispered to him. The first of these is Constantin Cavafy, a bureaucrat of Greek origin who toiled in the uninspiring environment of the British-run Egyptian ministry of public works in the early years of the 20th century. Instead, she propels us forward 23 centuries to meet two men who provide a vivid picture of the long half-life of the city’s bookish heritage. As late as the fourth century, Augustine of Hippo was disconcerted to notice that when Ambrose, bishop of Milan, read silently it was as if he had escaped into a world of his own where no one else could follow.įrom here, Vallejo does not, as you might anticipate, proceed in an orderly chronological manner through the gradual falling apart of the great Alexandrian project. Silent reading, when it eventually arrived, seemed highly suspect and slightly sneaky. Since all reading at that time occurred out loud rather than inside one’s head, the study rooms were a modern librarian’s nightmare: no one seemed to understand the requirement to shush. Indeed, it turns out that good hearing was a key skill. Here, she says, knowledge workers sat companionably side by side, not always agreeing, but able to listen to another point of view and discuss accordingly. Instead of a deep freeze of ancient knowledge, Vallejo pictures it as a joyous meeting place for lively minds. Once the library was up and running, it acquired a personality of its own that was markedly different from Alexander’s grasping narcissism. It sounds, as Vallejo rightly says, like the plot of a novel by Borges at his most postmodern. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides topped the shopping list. He didn’t live long enough to make a start, but over the third century BC the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt, Cleopatra’s predecessors, set about locating, buying and, when all else failed, stealing every book that had ever been written. Just as the young emperor announced: “The Earth I consider mine,” he also believed that all knowledge could be his, too, if only he could gather all existing books into one place. Reputedly dreamed up by Alexander the Great, who as a little boy used to sleep with a copy of the Iliad tucked under his pillow, there is no getting away from the fact that the library was conceived as a vanity project. This a huge project, so it is apt that Vallejo not only starts from, but repeatedly returns to the equally ambitious great library of Alexandria. As much as a history of books, Papyrus is also a history of reading. And also, more importantly, what goes on inside a reader when they take up a volume and embark on an imaginative and intellectual dance that might just change their life. While she pays due attention to the physicality of the book – what Oxford professor Emma Smith has called its “bookhood” – Vallejo is equally interested in what goes on inside its covers. In this generous, sprawling work, the Spanish historian and philologist Irene Vallejo sets out to provide a panoramic survey of how books shaped not just the ancient world but ours too. Within weeks the middle-aged lovers were embarked on the final chapter of their erotic misadventure, the one which would mark the beginning of the end both for them and for Alexandria’s fabled library. As a romantic gesture, it was equally provocative. On a logistical level this worked well: since the library was the biggest storehouse of books in the world, Cleopatra almost certainly had the shelf space.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |