Sunday, July 31, 2011

room exp exp h

                      ABY WARBURG;     THE STONE;    
                         THE PANMURE POET















...........a complicated (and variable) system. Those who
knew him spoke of the “instinct” that guided him in
compiling important bibliographies on whatever subject
interested him at the time, an instinct that led him
to rearrange (and keep rearranging) the books on the
shelves following the lines of thought he was at any
given moment pursuing. As Warburg imagined it, a
library was above all an accumulation of associations,
each association breeding a new image or text to be asso-
ciated, until the associations returned the reader to the
first page. For Warburg, every library was circular.
            Warburg dedicated his library, with its oval reading
room (which he called die kulturwissenschaft1iche Bibliothek
Warrburg, the Warburg Library of Cultural Science), to
the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, mother of
the Muses. For Warburg the history of humankind was
an ongoing, constantly changing attempt to give tongue
and features to archaic experiences, less individual than
generic, embedded in social memory. Like many schol-
ars of his generation, he had been influenced by the the-
theories of the German neurologist Richard Semon, who
had argued for a physiological theory of emotions.
According to Semon, memory is the quality that distin-
guishes living from dead matter. Any event affecting
living matter leaves a trace (what Semon calls an
engram) that can be animated when we remember. For
Warburg these engrams were in fact pure symbols alive
at the core of every culture, and what interested him
was why a given period (the Renaissance, for example,
or the Enlightenment) would be so affected by certain
of these symbols, or by certain aspects of them, that
they would shape the voice and style of its literature
and art. Because of its haunting power, Warburg won-
derfully described this active memory as “a ghost story
for adults.”






















                                              








                                                                 THE LIBRARY


                                                                    AS MIND

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

                        …to give visible form to the psychic presence and to the movements
of the soul,

Aby Warburg, Auswgewählte Schriften


Like Machiavelli, I often sit among my books at night.
While I prefer to write in the morning, at night I enjoy
reading in the thick silence, when triangles of light from
the reading lamps split my library shelves in two.
Above, the high rows of books vanish into darkness;
below sits the privileged section of the illuminated titles.
This arbitrary division, which grants certain books a
glowing presence and relegates others to the shadows, is
superseded by another order, which owes its existence
merely to what I can remember. My library has no cata-
logue; having placed the books on the shelves myself,
I generally know their position by recalling the library’s
layout, and areas of light or darkness make little differ-
ence to my exploring. The remembered order follows a
pattern in my mind, the shape and division of the library,
rather as a stargazer connects in narrative patterns the
pinpoints of the stars; but the library in turn reflects
the configuration of my mind, its distant astrologer. The
deliberate yet random order of the shelves, the choice of
subject matters, the intimate history of each book’s sur-
vival, the traces of certain times and certain places
between the pages, all point to a particular reader. A keen
observer might be able to tell who I am from a tattered
copy of the poems of Bias de Otero, the number of vol-
umes by Robert Louis Stevenson, the large section
devoted to detective stories, the minuscule section
devoted to literary theory, the fact that there is much
Plato and very little Aristotle on my shelves. Every 
library is autobiographical.
            In the Cathedral of Sainte Cecile of Albi, in the South
of France, a late-fifteenth-century fresco depicts a scene
from the Last Judgment. Under an unfurled scroll, the
recalled souls march towards their fate, each naked
solemnly carrying on the breast an open book. In this
troop of resurrected readers, the Book of Life has
divided and reissued as a series of individual volumes,
open, as the Apocalypse has it, so that the dead may be
“judged out of those things which were written in the
books.” The idea persists even today: our books will
bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we
are and who we have been, our books hold the share of
pages granted to us from the Book of Life. By the
we call ours we will be judged.
            What makes a library a reflection of its owner is not
merely the choice of the titles themselves, but the mesh
of associations implied in the choice. Our experience
builds on experience, our memory on other memories.
Our books build on other books that change or enrich
them, that grant them a chronology apart from that of lit-
erary dictionaries. I’m now, after all this time, incapable
of tracing all these connections myself. I forget, or don’t
even know, in what way many of these books relate to
one another. If I advance in one direction-Margaret
Laurence's African stories conjure up in my memory
Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, which in turn makes me
think of her Seven Gothic Tales, which leads me back to
Edgardo Cozarinsky (who introduced me to Dinesen’s
work)and his book on Borges and film, and further back
to the novels of Rose Macaulay, which Cozarinsky and
I discussed one afternoon long ago in Buenos Aires, both
of us surprised that someone else knew about them—
then I miss the other strands of this complicated web, and
wonder how, like a spider, I was able to string the seem-
ingly immeasurable distance, for example, from Ovid’s
Tristia to the poems of ‘Abd al-Rahman, exiled to North
Africa from his home in Spain. It is not only a matter of
fortuitous connections. Books are transformed by the
sequence in which they are read. Don Quixote read after
Kim and Don Quixote read after Huckleberry Finn are two
different books, both coloured by the reader’s experience
of journeys, friendship and adventures. Each of these
kaleidoscope volumes never cease to change; each new
reading lends it yet another twist, a different pattern.
Perhaps every library is ultimately inconceivable,
because, like the mind, it reflects upon itself, multiplying
geometrically with each new reflection. And yet, from a
library of solid books we expect a rigour that we forgive
in the library of the mind.
            Such fluid mental libraries are not (or were not)
uncommon; in Islam they are exemplary. Even though
the Koran was written down very early, most ancient
Arab literature was for a long time entrusted to the recol-
lection of its readers. For instance, after the death in 815
of the great poet Abu Nuwas, no copy of his work was
found; the poet had learned by heart all his poems, and in
order to set them down on paper the scribes had to resort
to the memory of those who had listened to the master.
Precision of recall was deemed all-important, and
throughout the Islamic Middle Ages, it was considered
more valuable to learn by listening to books read out
loud than by private study, because the text then entered
the body through the mind and not merely through the
eyes. Authors published not so much by transcribing
their work themselves as by dictating it to their assis-
tants, and students learned by hearing those texts read
out to them or by reading them to a teacher. Because of
the Islamic belief that only oral transmission was truly
legitimate, memory (not its physical representation
in the solid world of books and manuscripts, though
these were important enough to be treasured in schools
and mosques) was deemed to be the great repository of
a library. Up to a point, “library” and “memory” were
synonymous.
            And yet, however careful our reading, remembered
texts often undergo curious changes; they fragment,
shrivel up or grow unpredictably long. In my mental
library, The Tempest is reduced to a few immortal lines,
while a brief novel such as Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo
occupies my entire Mexican imaginary landscape. A
couple of sentences by George Orwell in the essay
“Shooting an Elephant” expand in my memory to sev-
eral pages of description and reflection that I think
I can actually see in my mind, printed on the page; of
the lengthy medieval romance The Devoured Heart, all
I can remember is the title.
            Neither the solid library on my shelves nor the shift-
ing one of memory holds absolute power for long. Over
time, the labyrinths of my two libraries mysteriously
intermingle. And often, through what psychologists call
the perseverance of memory (the mental phenomenon
by which a certain idea is perceived as true even after it
has proven false), the library of the mind ends by over-
riding the library of paper and ink.

Is it possible to set up a library that imitates this whimsi-
cal, associative order, one that might seem to an unin-
ormed observer a random distribution of books, but that
in fact follows a logical if deeply personal organization?
I can think of at least one example.

 One day in 1920, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, recently appointed
to the chair of philosophy at Hamburg’s New University and working at
the time on the first volume of his ground breaking Philosophy
of Symbolic Forms, asked to visit the famous Warburg Library,established
thirty years earlier by Aby Warburg. Following Warburg’s conception of
the universe, books on philosophy were set next to those
on astrology, magic and folklore, and art compendiums rubbed covers
with works of literature and religion, while manuals on
language were placed next to volumes of theology.
poetry and art. Cassirer was taken through the uniquely
organized collection by the assistant director, Fritz Saxl,
and at the end of the tour he turned to his host and
said, “I’ll never come back here. If I returned to this
labyrinth, I’d end up by losing my way.”
            Years later, Cassirer explained his panic: “[ Warburg’s]
library isn’t simply a collection of books but a catalogue
of problems. And it isn’t the thematic fields of the library
that provoked in me this overwhelming impression, but
rather the library’s very organizing principle, a principle
far more important than the mere extension of the sub-
jects covered. Here, indeed, the history of art, the his-
tory of religion and myth, the history of linguistics and
culture were not only placed side by side but linked one
to the other, and all of them linked in turn to a single
ideal centre.”211 After Warburg’s death in 1929, Cassirer
compared the shelves of the library’s reading room, built
to follow the elliptical shape of the walls, to “the breath
of a magician.” For Cassirer, Warburg’s books, arranged
according to the intricacies of his thought, were, like the
books of Prospero, the stronghold of his life’s force.

Aby Warburg was born in Hamburg on 13 June i866, the
eldest son of a Jewish banker. Photographs show him as
a short, shy-looking man with powerful dark eyes. In a
questionnaire he once imagined for his own amusement,
he described himself as “a small gentleman with a black
moustache who sometimes tells stories in dialect.”
Unable to reconcile himself to his father’s demands to
embrace both Jewish orthodoxy and the family banking
business, he suffered from long bouts of anxiety and
melancholia. To find relief, he sought experience of the
world in books, and became deeply interested in the
early philosophies of Greek and Rome, in the cultures of
the Renaissance, in Native American civilizations and in
Buddhist religion. He seemed unable to accept the con-
straints of any one discipline or school of thought. An
eclectic curiosity dominated all his undertakings.
            His passion for books and images began in his child-
hood. Among the earliest intellectual experiences he
could remember was seeing, at the age of six, the striking
illustrations of Balzac’s Petites misères de la vie conjugale,
depicting melodramatic family scenes in which weeping
women, angry men, screaming children and amused ser-
vants acted out the misfortunes of bourgeois married
life. The boy became obsessed by them, and they vividly
haunted his dreams. A couple of years later, he started
devouring books “full of stories about Red Indians.”
These images and adventures offered him, he was later
to recall, “a means of withdrawing from a depressing
reality in which I was quite helpless.” Unable to voice his
anger and frustration, what Warburg called the emotion
of pain, he sought and found “an outlet in fantasies o
romantic cruelty. This was my inoculation against active
cruelty.” His siblings remembered him always sur-
rounded by books, reading every scrap of paper he came
across—even the family encyclopedia, which he perused
from the first to the last volume.
            Not only reading but collecting books became
Warburg a vital need. On his thirteenth birthday, deter-
mined to follow neither his father’s career nor his
family’s religion, the voracious adolescent made his
younger brother Max the offer of his birthright:
would exchange his privilege, as the eldest son, of enter-
ing the family firm, for the promise that Max would buy
him all the books he ever wanted. Max, aged twelve
agreed. From then on, the many books purchased with
funds supplied by the faithful Max became the core of
Warburg’s library.
            Warburg’s collecting passion was never entirely hap-
hazard. On the contrary; from very early on, his reading
seems to have been directed towards certain very specific
questions. Most of us, looking back, find it astonishing to
recognize in our first books inklings of an interest that
did not become apparent until much later, which never-
theless apparently stirred us long before we could put
our interest into words. The emotions of Warburg's
childhood books finally found an explanation in Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoon, a classic text that he read for
the first time when he entered Bonn University at the age
twenty. Lessing’s Laocoon became for him a magical
touchstone. “One must be young,” the aged Goethe had
written almost sixty years earlier, “to understand the
influence that Lessing’s Laocoon had on us, tearing us
away from the passivity of contemplation and opening up
free realms of thought. The ut pictura poesis [the classical
comparison between the aesthetics of painting and those
poetry], so long misunderstood, was all of a sudden
brushed away; their summits seemed very different to us,
and yet they seemed very close in their foundations.” In
Lessing’s work the young Warburg recognized not only
power of an argument that attempted to explore the
different creative systems of images and words, but above
all the notion that each age recaptures for its own reasons
an aspect of tradition upon which it builds its own sym-
bology and meaning, what he was to call “the survival of
antiquity, a problem of a purely historical nature.” The
question that began to take shape for Warburg was how
our oldest symbols are renewed at different ages, and
how their reincarnations link and reverberate in each
other. One of the most resonant words in his intellectual
development was Kompatibilität, compatibility —
experience by association — so it’s not surprising that he
chose to explain his own library with a definition bor-
rowed from the critic Ewald Hering. For Warburg his
library was memory, but “memory as organized matter.”

The library that Warburg began to assemble in his
adolescence, which in 1909 he transferred to his new
house on the Heilwigstrasse in Hamburg, was above all a
personal one, and it followed a uniquely idiosyncratic
cataloguing system. During the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, a controversy raged in Germany
about the best method of organizing a library. The oppos-
ing parties argued, on the one hand, for a hierarchic
order of subjects to guide the reader from one field
knowledge to another, and on the other, for an order
based on the size of a volume and its date of acquisition.
(The latter, incidentally, was a system that had been
employed successfully in certain medieval libraries.) For
Warburg, neither method was satisfactory. He demanded
from his collection a fluidity and vivacity that neither
enclosure by subject nor restrictions of chronology
allowed him. Fritz Saxl noted in 1943 how Warburg had
reacted to the idea of such mechanical cataloguing, which,
in an age of increased book production, was rapidly
replacing the “much more scholarly familiarity which is
gained by browsing.” According to Saxl, “Warburg rec-
ognized the danger” and spoke of the “law of the good
neighbour.” The book with which one was familiar was
not, in most cases, the book one needed. It was the
unknown neighbour on the shelf that contained the vital
information, even though one might not guess this from
its title. “The overriding idea was that all the books
together—each containing its larger or smaller bit of
information and being supplemented by its neighbours-
should by their titles guide the student to perceive the
essential forces of the human mind and its history. Books
were for Warburg more than instruments of research.
Assembled and grouped, they exercised the thought of
mankind in its constant and in its changing aspects.
                       

Not only books. Warburg had a remarkable memory
for images, and was able to weave complicated tapestries
of iconographical connections which he then attempted
to expand upon in fragmentary essays. While poring
through antiquarian catalogues, he would jot down on
small cards the titles that caught his attention, accompa-
nied by dense commentaries in what he called his “thick
eel-gruel style,” filing them in separate boxes accord-
ing to a complicated (and variable) system. Those who
knew him spoke of the “instinct” that guided him in
compiling important bibliographies on whatever subject
interested him at the time, an instinct that led him
to rearrange (and keep rearranging) the books on the
shelves following the lines of thought he was at any
given moment pursuing. As Warburg imagined it, a
library was above all an accumulation of associations,
each association breeding a new image or text to be asso-
ciated, until the associations returned the reader to the
first page. For Warburg, every library was circular.
            Warburg dedicated his library, with its oval reading
room (which he called die kulturwissenschaft1iche Bibliothek
Warrburg, the Warburg Library of Cultural Science), to
the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, mother of
the Muses. For Warburg the history of humankind was
an ongoing, constantly changing attempt to give tongue
and features to archaic experiences, less individual than
generic, embedded in social memory. Like many schol-
ars of his generation, he had been influenced by the the-
theories of the German neurologist Richard Semon, who
had argued for a physiological theory of emotions.
According to Semon, memory is the quality that distin-
guishes living from dead matter. Any event affecting
living matter leaves a trace (what Semon calls an
engram) that can be animated when we remember. For
Warburg these engrams were in fact pure symbols alive
at the core of every culture, and what interested him
was why a given period (the Renaissance, for example,
or the Enlightenment) would be so affected by certain
of these symbols, or by certain aspects of them, that
they would shape the voice and style of its literature
and art. Because of its haunting power, Warburg won-
derfully described this active memory as “a ghost story
for adults.”
            And the library itself? What was it like to stand in the
midst of what Cassirer had compared to Prospero’s
stronghold? Most libraries give an impression of system-
atic order, of an organization made manifest by themes
or numbers or alphabetical sequences. Warburg’s library
shows no such system. When I visited the reconstructed
reading room in Hamburg (which today holds only a
small part of his volumes) and inspected the rounded
shelves in the oval central chamber, the feeling I had was
bewilderment; it was like standing in the middle of a for-
eign city whose signposts doubtlessly meant something
but whose sense I couldn’t fathom. The shelves suggested
to the eye an uninterrupted association of titles, not a lin-
ear order with a beginning and an end. Intellectually it
was possible for me to find reasons for the proximity of
any two titles, but those reasons could be so varied or
could seem so far-fetched that I could not relate them to
any traditional sequence—such as M following L, or
2999 preceding 3000. Warburg’s system was closer to that
of poetic composition. Reading the verse “Bright is the
ring of words” on a page offers an immediate and com-
plete comprehension of the poet’s vision. The reader
requires no explanation; the line conveys a full and
instantaneous revelation about the act of reading,
through the words and the elicited music. But if the poet
were explicitly to lay before us all the connecting byways
and meanderings springing from his ineffable intuition as
to the nature of poetry—if he tried to make all the leads
and connections visible to us—such comprehension
would elude us. So it is with Warburg’s library.
But Warburg would not allow these connections to
remain invisible, nor would he consider them except as
constantly changing, so he constructed his library as a
place uninterrupted by sharp angles, in which they could
retain endless mobility. In a sense, his library was an
attempt to disclose, in all their rawness, the bare nerves
of his thought, and to allow room for his ideas to migrate
and mutate and mate. If most libraries of his time resem-
bled an entomologist’s display case of pinned and
labelled specimens, Warburg’s revealed itself to the visi-
or as a child’s glass-fronted ant farm.

In the spring of 1914, bending to his colleagues’ pressure,
Warburg decided to open his library to scholars and
scholarly research, instituting as well a system of grants
that would enable students to come to Hamburg and
work. Fourteen years earlier he had warily mentioned the
idea to his brother Max; now he returned to the vast proj-
ect, and discussed its possibilities with Fritz Saxl. He did
so with great reluctance because, he admitted, he loathed
losing possession of the private intellectual realm he had
so laboriously created. And yet he realized that this open-
ing up of the library was the necessary next step in
his attempt to chart the intricate symbolic heritage
humankind, “the afterlife of the ancient world.”
            But the First World War put a temporary end to the
plans. In the midst of the bleakness and confusion of
time, Warburg, who had suffered intermittently from
anxiety and depression since his childhood, began to
intuit a bleak concordance between his mental state and
the state of the world. “Like a seismograph, his sensitive
nerves had already recorded the underground tremors to
which others remained utterly deaf,” wrote one of
contemporaries. Warburg now saw his search for con-
nections between our earliest symbolic representations of
irrational impulses and fears, and later artistic manifest-
tions of those symbols, as a tension reflected in his own
mental struggles. He had wanted to believe that science
would eventually, by chronicling the metamorphoses of
our phobic reflexes, find rationally apprehensible expla-
nations for our primordial emotional experience.
Instead, he realized, science had constructed as the latest
avatar an even more advanced machinery of war, with its
mustard gas and deadly trenches.
            In one of his fragments (to which he had appended the
exorcism “You live and do me no harm” he wrote the
following: “We are in the age of Faust, in which the mod-
ern scientist endeavours—between magic practice and
mathematics—to conquer the realm of reflective reason
through an increased awareness of the distance between
the self and the external world.” The end of the war in
1918 brought him little relief. Two years later the distance
seemed, in his eyes, to have vanished almost completely.
            In 1920, facing the prospect of opening his library
to a scholarly public, and unable to sustain the mental
anguish any more, Warburg entered the famous clinic
of the Swiss doctors Otto and Ludwig Binswanger in
Kreuzlingen, where Friedrich Nietzsche had been treated
thirty years earlier.He remained there until 1924.
“Why,” he asked then, “does fate consign a creative
human being to the realm of eternal unrest, leaving it up
to him to choose where his intellectual upbringing will
take place: whether in hell, purgatory or paradise?"
            His time at the clinic was one of slow recovery and
attempts at reassembly, as he tried to put together his
scattered mind, fragmented as it was into thousands of
images and piecemeal notes. “God is in the details,” he
Iiked repeating. And yet he felt—like Rousseau, who
had said, “I die in details”-that he could no longer
gather the many strands of image and thought he had
once pursued. But under Dr. Binswanger’s care he
began to feel whole again, and in 1923 he asked whether
the authorities would release him if he could prove his
mental stability. He suggested speaking to the clinic’s
patients, and on April 23 he delivered a lecture on native
serpent rituals he had witnessed in North America as a
young man. In a journal note he made at the time, he
remarked that he saw himself as Perseus, slayer of the
serpent-headed Medusa, who avoided staring directly
into the poisonous monster’s eyes by looking at her
reflection in his shield. He also noted that, in the Middle
Ages, Perseus had been debased from hero to mere
fortune-teller, to be rescued only later, during the
Renaissance, as a symbol of heroic humanity.
            When Warburg left the clinic in 1924, he discovered
that Saxl, in agreement with Warburg’s family, had finally
transformed the library into the projected research centre.
The change, however much he had foreseen it, troubled
him greatly and made him feel diminished; “Warburg
redux,” he signed one of his letters at the time. And yet
the transformation also seemed to fill him with “an
almost awe-inspiring energy,” and he set himself to work
once again, under these new conditions, amidst his
beloved books.
            It would be obvious to any visitor walking into
Warburg’s library that, from its very conception, his cre-
ation was essentially a visual one. The shape of the
shelves, the associated titles they housed, the pictures
and photographs that littered the rooms, all spoke of his
concern with the physical representation of ideas and
symbols. The sources of his questions were images;
books allowed him to reflect on these images, and pro-
vided words to bridge the silence between them.
Memory, that key word in Warburg’s vocabulary, meant
above all the memory of images.
            Warburg’s unfinished and unfinishable project was
the great iconographic sequence he called Mnemosyne,
a vast collection of images that charted, across a tapestry
of connections, the many trails the scholar had been
following. But how to display these images? How to
place them in front of him so that they could be studied
in sequence, but a sequence that could be varied accord-
ing to new ideas and newly perceived connections? The
solution to this problem came from Saxl. Upon Warburg’s
return to Hamburg, Saxl met him with large wooden
panels, like standing blackboards, across which he had
stretched black hessian. Warburg’s images could be fixed
with pins on the cloth, and easily removed whenever
he wanted to alter their position. These giant displays,
"pages” of an endless book of variable sequence, became
the core of all Warburg’s activities in the last years of his
life. Since he could change both the panels and
images on them at will, they became the physical
illustration of his realm of thought and his library,
to which he appended streams of notes and comments.
"These images and words are intended as help for those
who come after me in their attempt to achieve clarity,”
he wrote, “and thus to overcome the tragic tension
veen instinctive magic and discursive logic. They
the confessions of an (incurable) schizoid, deposited
in the archives of mental healers.”  In fact, Saxl’s
panels-a book of giant shifting pages-restored  to
Warburg, up to a point, his lost private space; they were
private domain that helped him recover some of his
mental health.

            Warburg died in 1929, at the age of sixty-three.
Three years after his death, a couple of volumes of his
collected works appeared in Germany; they were the last
to be published in his homeland for a long time.
Fragmented and wonderfully far-ranging, his writings
are yet another version of his library, another represen-
tation of the intricacies of his thought, another map of
his extraordinary mind. He wanted his intuition to con-
clude in scientific laws; he would have liked to believe
that the thrill and terror of art and literature were steps
towards understanding cause and function. And yet,
again and again, he returned to the notion of memory
as desire, and desire itself as knowledge. In one of his
fragments he writes “that the work of art is something
hostile moving towards the beholder.” With his library
he attempted to create a space in which that hostility
would not be tamed (something he realized could not be
done without destruction) but lovingly reflected back,
with curiosity, respect and awe, a mirror of his curious,
intelligent mind.
            In 1933, following the appointment of Hitler as
Chancellor of the Reich, the Warburg library and staff
emigrated to England. Six hundred boxes of books plus
furniture and equipment were shipped across the sea to
London. I like to imagine the many barges crossing the
water, laden with the volumes assembled over the years,
a fragmented portrait of their owner—a reader now
dead, but present in this dismantled representation of his
library about to be reshaped in a foreign land. The books
were first accommodated in an office building in
Millbank; three years later, the University of London
agreed to house the collection but not rebuild the oval
shelves On 28 November 1944, the Warburg Institute
was finally incorporated in the university, where it still
functions today. Fifty-one years later, a copy of
Warburg’s house was built in Hamburg on the site of his
old home on the Heilwigstrasse, and an attempt was
made, based on original photographs, to reproduce the
shelving and the display of part of his collection, so that
anyone who visits the house and stands for a moment in
the reading room can feel as if Warburg’s mind is still at
work among his memorable and changing shelves.

(Alberto Manguel in "The Library at Night")



                       
room x exp f'''

Saturday, July 30, 2011



Rom x exp g'











             



                     







                                                  

Monday, July 18, 2011

Room x exp f1 



Long, long, in the final room

my rough boy held him.

And that cold day in the gloom

in the white house by the blackening pines

he held out his hand like a leaf

searching for heat from the sun

that would be love that day and that night

in the house his home by the pines by the hill.





"Oh lost!......."  Thomas Wolf


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