Dear bibliopathologist,
last Tuesday the funeral of a high school professor who lived above my study with his wife took place. The next day, from the early hours of the morning, the mother-in-law and widow began dragging voluminous black bags down the stairs, taking newspapers, clothes, DVDs and above all books to the waste bins which, having been left open the bags, were scattered under the rain these days. I experienced the gesture of scattering the volumes as something profoundly sacrilegious as well as vulgar, as if they had killed the owner reader a second time.
– Cinzia
Dear bibliopathologist,
I have always believed that getting rid of a book badly, for example throwing it in the garbage, was an act bordering on blasphemy. Therefore, I have instituted a small ceremony to give a ritual dress to the gesture of abandonment: I place my copy on a parapet along the river bank, waiting for a merciful hand to appropriate it. I add a short dedication to the future unknown reader. But, I wonder, what rite is it in your opinion? Of a rite of passage? A propitiatory rite? Perhaps atoning? Or even a funeral rite?
– Luca
Dear Cinzia, dear Luca,
your letters, placed side by side, make up a diptych. If it were paintings, on a panel we would see the famous Librarian (1562) dell’Arcimboldo, a human figure entirely composed of books of various shapes and colors; on the other we would see instead The Shakespeare Scholar (2003) by London-based illustrator Jonathan Wolstenholme, in which a book with arms writes on a sheet of paper with a quill while in the other hand it holds a skull in Hamlet. In the first painting we would contemplate the reader’s bibliomorphism; in the second, the anthropomorphism of the book.
Books resemble humans more than all other inanimate objects, says Joseph Conrad, “because they contain our thinking, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our faithfulness to the truth and our persistent inclination to error. “; above all, he adds, “they resemble us in their precarious relationship with life”. They fear death, like us.
Men, on the other hand, resemble books. The magnificent epitaph of Benjamin Franklin (which was not used, unfortunately) reveals this:
Books as people, people as books: these analogies arranged in a row explain a lot of your sense of sacrilege, Cinzia, and your sense of blasphemy, Luca. You don’t throw away a corpse piece by piece in the garbage, as did the professor’s widow and mother-in-law (even the shady uxoricide of the Window to the courtyard he buried his wife’s remains in the garden): a library is a living organism, a double paper of its owner raised and nurtured lovingly for a lifetime; it should at least be allowed to decompose gracefully, without all this haste to get rid of it.
Your funeral rite, Luke, is the identical form of piety seen in the mirror, the inverted image that appears to us when we move to the other side of the analogy. But it is also a small propitiatory rite. Who knows whether your book, left on the river bank like Moses in his basket of reeds, will not be picked up one day by a pharaoh’s daughter.