A garland of quotations LXXIV
Culled from the finest archivists in literary history, and re-woven every Wednesday
Beleeve, if you please, that the ruine of this Library will be more carefully marked in all Histories and Calendars, than the taking and sacking of Constantinople.
•Gabriel Naudé, News from France, or a Description of the Library of Cardinall Mazarini (1652).
The Catalogue of the Library of the London Institution is one of the handsomest ever produced. Unfortunately the cost of production was too great for the funds of the Institution, and the elaborate Catalogue of Tracts was discontinued after the letter F.
•Henry Benjamin Wheatley, How to Form a Library (1886).
He [Gilles de Rais] was an accomplished man, a scholar, an able general, and a courtier; but suddenly the impulse to murder and destroy came upon him whilst sitting in the library reading Suetonius; he yielded to the impulse, and became one of the greatest monsters of cruelty the world has produced.
•Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Were-Wolves (1865).
Formerly the illiterate could not read. But lately we (a national “we”) have taught them to do so. In our simplicity, we had thought that English Literature would be enough for them to go on with, and with English Literature we stocked our public libraries. We were quite astonished when recent statistics showed us that the thing was a failure, for we had supposed that being able to spell out pages of type must surely create good taste. “What then,” we cried, “do the illiterate read?” Other statistics made answer. In the sale lists of the booksellers we read the names of Hocking, Caine, Du Maurier, Macleran, Crockett, and Corelli; after each name, certain appalling numbers. As we read them, we bow our heads.
•H.G. Wells, “Our Lady of ‘Pars’” (1896).
Why, I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book.
•Mark Twain, widely attributed.
Opposite the closed doors of the Opera two green bronze horses
guard a locked square like bookends, while odours
of the decaying century drift over the gardens
with the smell of books chained in the National Library.
•Derek Walcott, “Signs” (1997).
No less in the quick rush of vivid streets,
And libraries with long rows of mouldering thought,
Is nature, than in green retreats…
•Arthur Colton “The Cheneaux Islands” (1907).
For the present, we will arrange these treasures of the deep in our library, and make them the beginning of a Museum of Natural History, which will afford us equal pleasure and instruction.
•Johann Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson (1812).
To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic times is hard for our imagination—they seem too much like mere museum specimens. Yet there is no tooth in any one of those museum-skulls that did not daily through long years of the foretime hold fast to the body struggling in despair of some fated living victim.
•William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).
Truth in the Bible is an orchard rather than a museum. Dogmatism will be very valuable to us when scientific necessity makes us go to the museum. Criticism will be very useful is seeing that only fruit-bearers grow in the orchard. But truth in the doctrinal form is not proper assimilable food for the soul of man.
•Henry Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1886).
Forget all experiences involving wincing.
And anything to do with chamber music.
Museums on Sunday afternoons, etcetera.
The old masters. All that.
Forget the young girls. Try and forget them.
The young girls. And all that.
•Raymond Carver, “The Young Girls” (1989).
References: Naudé: quoted in Wheatley, op. cit.; Wells: The Saturday Review vol. 82 no. 2135 (Sept. 12, 1896); Walcott: The Bounty (FSG, 1997); Colton: Harps Hung Up in Babylon (Henry Holt, 1907); Wyss, trans. Agnes Kinloch Kingston (Dell, 1960); Carver, A New Path to the Waterfall (Atlantic, 1989); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.