A few years ago, a beloved elderly member of our church was going through a health crisis. His decades-long hearing loss had exacerbated to the point that even hearing aids could no longer help much. At the same time, his eyesight was rapidly deteriorating because of several medical conditions. At last, his doctor informed him that it was only a matter of weeks before he would be fully deaf and blind. His reaction? A lifelong avid reader, he started spending his entire days reading Scripture over and over, with the hopes of memorizing as much as possible before the complete and irreversible dark and silence set in. The Bible was the book that had meant the most to him throughout his life, so he had resolved to treasure it as the last book he would ever read.
The story has a happy ending of sorts. While he did indeed go fully blind, with new technology for hearing aids, he has not had to settle for a life of utter silence after all. Audiobooks now make enjoyment of books possible for those in his situation. But his story of frantic, prayerful reading in preparation for the end of sight and sound came to mind as I was reading William Marx’s new book, Libraries of the Mind.
We are what we read, shaped intellectually and spiritually and relationally over the course of a lifetime by the books we read, re-read, misread, remember, and misremember in some way. More than that, we are formed even by books we merely heard of and have an inkling about their contents. As they marinate in our memory for years and decades, these books become part of our own invisible inner libraries. From those invisible shelves, sometimes decidedly dusty and disordered, we retrieve references, ideas, entire phrases, perhaps without remembering precisely whence they came. All that matters is that they are there. But in the process, the systematic study of these inner libraries is integral for understanding physical libraries and their histories. All libraries, after all, are shaped by librarians, writers, and readers—all those who curate them, love them, contribute to them, and use them, hopefully not dog-earing pages like some sort of barbarian.
Marx opens with this striking story:
“What do we need libraries for? One of the greatest and most beautiful studies on literature was written during the tragic destitution of a Jewish intellectual who fled to Istanbul in order to escape the Nazis, having left his entire library behind. Erich Auerbach thus wrote Mimesis, a history of the representation of reality through narrative, spanning from Homer and the Bible to marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf. All of Western literature is reflected in this unparalleled compendium of literary knowledge, based primarily on the memory of past readings.”
Most of us are not writing monumental books based on memory of past reading alone. Still, libraries of the mind form within us all, whether we are aware of this curation process or not. Sometimes this realization happens through hardship, when a booklover no longer has access to his beloved physical library. In the case of Auerbach, in fact, he did have access to new libraries in Istanbul. But they were not the same. He found them incompatible with his system of work and thought. Their very existence, perhaps, spurred him no less actively to the process of writing Mimesis than did the tragic loss of his personal library, left behind in a place where he could never return.
Libraries, both visible and invisible, though, are not static, Marx argues. We see this most readily perhaps in our own home libraries. When my husband and I moved across the country two years ago, we undertook the difficult task of culling some of our considerable book collection, the result of the marriage of two academics, who each brought a library for a dowry (but definitely not enough bookcases). Some books, deemed less needed or significant or guilty merely of existing in duplicate in the same home, got left behind during that move. Do we still remember some of these rejects? Maybe, maybe not. Not all were equally loved. Indeed, those that were truly loved and still read regularly came along.
This phenomenon of discarding what is not read from physical libraries and inner ones too raises a key question: “Why do books get lost? Either because of disinterest or because one book says better, more succinctly, or more memorably what a previous one had developed with painstaking detail. Over time, everything ends up in compendiums and textbooks.” Some losses perhaps aren’t very emotionally weighty. Few weep for old mathematics textbooks. Other losses, however, are civilizational in scope. As a classicist, I mourn the books I wish I could read, of whose existence we only know from references in later authors. Indeed, no classics social is complete without someone asking the ice breaker question: which book from antiquity that hasn’t survived do you wish we had?
Marx is thinking about this question as well, in fact. Several times throughout the book, he comes back to the conundrum of Greek tragedy. It was a remarkably popular genre—in antiquity and still so today. Yet only a minuscule number of the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides survive. From an estimated 648 Athenian tragedies from 472 to 401 BC, “we retain only 32 complete works by three playwrights. Specifically, we have 7 tragedies by Aeschylus, 7 by Sophocles, and 18 by Euripides. The scale of loss is staggering: we have retained merely 1 or 2 percent of all written Greek tragedies.” Why is this the case? And how do we explain why these tragedies survived, and not others? The cruel truth is: Ancient readers made these decisions, and we’re stuck with them.
A selection bias is particularly obvious in the tragedies of Euripides: while the majority of his tragedies (70% of the lost ones!) had happy endings, the majority of those that survived had unhappy ones, showing the readers’ preference for those tragedies that had truly tragic endings of the sort that, indeed, came to be a defining feature of the genre in our minds. The implications are significant and reveal the power of librarians and readers in curating not only their own libraries but those for the future. We share with others the books that we love, shelving them with glee on others’ metaphorical libraries of the mind. Others, nevertheless, we mercilessly purge, leaving them behind on the latest cross-country house move.
So where does this leave us, twenty-first-century readers? Perhaps, at the most obvious level, with a reminder of our finitude. There are only so many books any one person can read in the course of a lifetime. At the same time, though, we have access to more books than anyone before us. Libraries of our homes and minds can now more easily than ever include literature translated from myriad languages. Such broader reading enhances our capacity for valuing beauty and wonder not only in literature but in the world all around.
Awareness of this reality—that there are many more beautiful books than we could ever read—perhaps heightens the pressure to read well and choose wisely. But in the age of AI and everything digital, it is also a beautiful reminder that to read is human.
