John Donne’s Three Images of Humanity: Body, Library, Continent
Part Two: People as Books in a Library, and Part Three: Humanity as a Continent
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A Poetic Preamble: Wallace Stevens on the Reader and the Book
The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm
The house was quiet and the world was calm.The reader became the book; and summer nightWas like the conscious being of the book.The house was quiet and the world was calm.The words were spoken as if there was no book,Except that the reader leaned above the page,Wanted to lean, wanted much most to beThe scholar to whom his book is true, to whomThe summer night is like a perfection of thought.The house was quiet because it had to be.The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:The access of perfection to the page.And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,In which there is no other meaning, itselfIs calm, itself is summer and night, itselfIs the reader leaning late and reading there.Wallace Stevens
My most recent post explored John Donne’s metaphoric language of the body as employed in his Seventeenth Meditation from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624).1 I turn now to the second and third images in that meditation: people as individual chapters, or books, in a universal heavenly library, and as parts of a continent, not isolated islands.
First, of people as books in a library, Donne writes,
“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.”
Here, Donne pictures God as both writer and librarian: the author of the book of mankind, compiled in a single volume. We are individual chapters in this great book, and when we die we are not torn out of the book and discarded, but “translated” into a better language. Translated here has the obvious sense of putting the words of one language into the words of another, as in a textual translation, but translate also means “to transfer.” Thus, Paul’s letter to the Colossians refers to God the Father, “Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son.” (1: 13) The epistle to the Hebrews says that “By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God.” (11:5) Donne has this second sense in mind as he lists the various modes of “translation” by which we pass out of this life and into the next: age, sickness, war, justice. God’s hand, Donne writes, is in each of those translations; furthermore, that same hand of God “shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.” In this passage Donne not only claims that we are of “one volume,” and of a single author, he also pictures us as “scattered leaves,” pages of books awaiting God’s bindery, to be placed in a heavenly library so that we finally “lie open to one another.” This bears much thought.
Of course, Donne is not alone in his metaphoric understanding of “the book.” Galileo refers to “the great Book of the Universe”; for him the universe “is a book written in a language whose characters are geometric figures”2 This view was closely aligned with the medieval idea of the “Book of Nature” and the “Book of Scripture,” two mutually reinforcing and complementary perspectives on truth and reality: Christian revelation was not seen as incompatible with scientific discovery. These ideas found expression in Shakespeare as well: In As You Like It, for instance, Duke Senior, banished by his brother from the court to the forest of Arden, says in praise of nature,
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stone, and good in everything. (2.15-17)
The love-sick Orlando expresses a similar idea:
O Rosalind! These trees shall be my books,
And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character. (3.2.5-6)
This image of the book has a long tradition going back to the Bible which, of course, is itself a library of individual books. This begins with the first chapter of Genesis when, in the beginning, God’s speech brought all things into existence: the universe itself was created by the word of God. This is a linguistically constituted world, in which language and reality are intricately intertwined. It should be no surprise then that a central feature of the Bible is the preservation of words and names in books. While the Bible does not refer to libraries as such, the 66 separate books of the Old and New Testaments constitute a stunning collection of ancient writings. Within those books, still others are mentioned. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the book of Exodus refers to “the book of the covenant” (24:7). It also records Moses’ words pleading to God after the incident of the golden calf to spare the guilty Israelites: “Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin–; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.” God replies, “Whosoever hath sinned against me, him will I blot out of my book” (32:32-33). The book of Numbers refers enigmatically to a mysterious “book of the wars of the Lord” (21:14). Second Kings notes that more information about King Hezekiah can be found in “the book of the annals of the kings of Judah.” Second Samuel 1: 18 mentions a “book of Jasher.” First Chronicles 29:29 refers to “the book of Samuel the seer, the book of Nathan the prophet, and the book of Gad the seer.” Malachi speaks of a “book of remembrance” (34: 16).
New Testament references begin with the preamble to John’s gospel:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. (1: 1-3)
John alludes here to the Creative Word of Genesis. He also claims that the Word was made Flesh, in the person of Jesus. Jesus himself continues the Hebrew theme of the book, telling his disciples, “rejoice, because your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10: 20). Philippians 4: 3 refers to those “whose names are in the book of life.” In Revelation 3: 5 Jesus promises to “him that overcometh,” “I will not blot out his name out of the book of life, but I will confess his name before my Father, and before his angels.” Revelation 21:27 refers to the names of the righteous written in “the Lamb’s book of life.”
The biblical tradition of textual records, references, and prophetic utterances has a long post-biblical life in both Judaism and Christianity. From Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, to Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, Jews pray Kotvenu b'sefer he-ḥayyim: Inscribe us in the Book of Life. And, during the Kol Nidrei service of Yom Kippur, the Avinu Malkeinu prayer is recited:
Our Father, our King, inscribe us in the book of happy life;
Our Father, our King, inscribe us in the book of redemption and salvation,
Our Father, our King, inscribe us in the book of sustenance and maintenance;
Our Father, our King, inscribe us in the book of merit;
Our Father, our King, inscribe us in the book of forgiveness and pardon.
And, of course, there are the many volumes that constitute the Talmud. In all, a veritable Jewish library!
The Annunciation: Word and Flesh
The Christian tradition is also, of course, very book centric. For instance, in portrayals of the Annunciation, when the angel Gabriel visits Mary to announce that she is going to bear the Christ child, Mary is typically pictured in the act of reading a book, presumably the book of Isaiah, in which Isaiah prophecies, “the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel” (7: 14). The crucial point here is that Mary, a young Jewish girl from the first century, is literate and reading from the Prophets; she has in her home library the books of the Hebrew Scriptures!
Here are two examples of the Annunciation, the first by Leonardo Da Vinci, the second by Piermatteo Lauro de’ Manfredi da Amelia.
Annunciation, by Leonardo da Vinci, 1472-75
Annunciation by Piermatteo Lauro de’ Manfredi da Amelia, c. 1485
Leonardo portrays Mary in a moment of tranquility, sitting at her lectern, studying a text. The fingers of her right hand are tense, even rigid, as they hold her place in her reading, for she has been interrupted, and her eyes are no longer on the text, but lifted upward, gazing at the winged figure before her. But, perhaps more accurately, we should understand this moment as no interruption at all, for her left hand is raised, palm open, in a gesture of welcome and recognition, and her face is calm, even expectant. Mary is experiencing the immediate fulfillment of prophecy; her diligent reading has brought into existence this new presence, this angelic figure before her, who in this moment of recognition mirrors her gesture of greeting, his outstretched hand with two fingers raised to her in blessing. In this exchange the Word is made Flesh: that is, the prophetic word is fulfilled, Isaiah’s text finding its fulfillment in contact with the flesh of Mary’s fingers. Those words, lying dormant through the centuries, are brought suddenly to life under the searching fingers of Mary. She is like the director of a musical ensemble: with one hand on the score and the other hand raised, she is conducting the scene of her own annunciation.
The Annunciation by Piermatteo Da Amelia pictures Mary in a calmer, more meditative moment, her eyes cast downward at the little book held in her left hand while her right hand clutches her cloak. She is intent on the passage before her, and perhaps not yet aware of the angelic being who has suddenly appeared. It is a richly symbolic scene; the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, hovers above the two figures; Gabriel holds in his left-hand a white lily, symbol of Mary’s purity; his upraised right hand signifies his words to her: “Blessed art thou among women.” This Mary is more submissive than Leonardo’s, more passive in the presence of the angel and of the words of the text she is reading. She is a contemplative Mary, meditating on the text even as Gabriel announces its fulfillment.
In both Annunciations Mary discovers her destiny only through having first read the prophecy in Isaiah. She is indebted to the prior work of generations of Hebrew scholars engaged in the faithful preservation and transmittal of that ancient text. A collection of such scrolls and books, as we have already established, is called a library. As a repository of the past, a library is supremely dedicated to the preservation of knowledge for future generations. It is the very function of a library to make accessible such life-bringing and life-changing words as Mary was reading on that fateful occasion.
The Sistine Chapel: A Scattering of Leaves
Another example of a collection of Christian writings constituting a nascent library comes from the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. Around the ceiling are twelve prophetic figures who all anticipated the coming of Christ in their writings. Seven of these are prophets from the Hebrew Scriptures, and five are pagan Sibyls—female prophets—from ancient Greece and Rome. They are all portrayed reading their books or scrolls; their assembled writings would surely make up a representative library of texts, by both men and women, both pagan and Hebrew, from the ancient world. Perhaps the most famous of these figures is the Delphic Sibyl:
Delphic Sibyl, Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Michelangelo, 1509
For our study of Donne the more interesting among these twelve figures is the Cumaean Sibyl, the ancient prophetess who guided Aeneas through the Underworld in Virgil’s The Aeneid. She wrote her prophecies on leaves and placed them at the mouth of her cave. If collected, these cryptic verses could be bound into books, leaves of trees transformed into the leaves of a book; but if left at the cave mouth, they might be scattered by the winds and never read. Here is Michelangelo’s Cumaean Sibyl:
Cumaean Sibyl, Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Michelangelo, 1510
The Cumaean Sibyl’s scattered leaves deserve special attention, for they recall the body’s scattered members as discussed in the previous blog posting. We noted there that the Latin term, disjecta membra, can be translated as “scattered fragments, limbs, or remains.” Following the Roman poet Horace, we can refer more specifically to the disiecti membra poetae, the “limbs of a dismembered poet”—that is, the loose pages or leaves of a poet’s body of work. Even if the leaves have been scattered to the winds, they may nevertheless be brought back together and reassembled into a legible and orderly unity. Such a collection of pages is called a book, just as a collection of books is called a library.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge had the Cumaean Sibyl in mind when he published his volume of poems entitled Sibylline Leaves: A Collection of Poems (1817), explaining that the title is an “allusion to the fragmentary and widely scattered state in which the poems have been long suffered to remain.” Coleridge’s editorial work involved only a single volume of his “scattered poetry,” whereas Donne promises a universal eschatological reality: the hand of God will bind up “all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.” This vision of a Universal Library is the apotheosis of what a library is meant to be: an archive free and open to all, transparent, organized, accessible. It will be finally achieved when all its individual books, made up of all their many chapters and pages, are gathered into a coherent whole.
Donne’s sermon LXXXI proclaims that the resurrection and reconstitution of our physical bodies will be the miraculous work of God: “God beckons for the bodies of his saints, and in the twinkling of an eye, that body that was scattered over all the elements, is sat down at the right hand of God, in a glorious resurrection.” Donne pictures God reassembling our bodies in “the twinkling of an eye,” but for us the project of arranging the scattered Sibylline leaves of our lives is more laborious. It is the work, ultimately, of a whole society exercising judgment and discernment in selecting and preserving its valued books and other artifacts. A library must reflect a culture’s history—the celebration, codification, and preservation of its achievements.
The Library of Congress: A Gathering of Leaves
An example of such a library is the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress in Washington, D. C.: a magnificent architectural achievement displaying symmetry, proportion, balance, order, contrast, unity, and coherence in its structure, and exhibiting a striking cultural confidence in its organization. The following categories and names I give without commentary; I intend this information, lightly edited, to stand on its own as a reminder of what once constituted the elements of a comprehensive education. I have also included two photos of the Main Reading Room and the Ceiling of the Great Hall. Note the beauty of the architecture, the sheer grandeur of the space. My source is the official Library of Congress website:
https://www.loc.gov/loc/walls/jeff1.html
The Jefferson Building is a heroic setting for a national institution. Today it is recognized as a unique blending of art and architecture, a structure that celebrates learning, nationalism, and American turn-of-the-century confidence and optimism. The Jefferson Building also reflects its own time and prejudices. It emphasizes the achievements of western civilization, and most of the names and images on its walls evoke a society dominated by western thought. Thus, for many different reasons, the elaborate embellishment of the Jefferson Building is worth careful attention. The building is celebratory, inspirational, and educational. Few structures represent human aspiration in such dramatic fashion.
The Jefferson Building, Main Reading Room
The Jefferson Building, Ceiling of the Great Hall
The following pages outline the organization of the Library of Congress as it confidently maps out the world into distinct categories: Philosophy, Art, History, Commerce, Religion, Science, Law, and Poetry. Great artists, musicians, writers, and scientists are unapologetically celebrated for their contributions to the arts and sciences: Herodotus, St. Paul, Shakespeare, Newton, Homer, Beethoven, Plato, etc. Oral tradition is acknowledged, even while the library honors the evolution of writing and books. An allegory of Good Government warns that “Corrupt Legislation leads to Anarchy,” while “Good Administration leads to Peace and Prosperity.” These are a sampling of the names and the categories of knowledge that every well-educated person should know, all in a repository available to everyone.
The Portico Busts
In the portico of the Jefferson Building's front entrance pavilion nine great men are commemorated by busts:
DEMOSTHENES, EMERSON, IRVING, GOETHE, FRANKLIN, MACAULAY, HAWTHORNE, SCOTT, DANTE.
The Entrance Porch
The Main Entrance to the Jefferson Building features six life-size figures. They represent Literature, Science and Art. Of the two figures representing Literature, the left one holds a writing tablet and the right one holds a book while gazing into the distance. Of the two figures representing Science, the first holds the torch of Knowledge, and the second looks upward, thus repeating, in a general way, the distinction between the practical and the abstract. The third group represents Sculpture and Painting.
The Bronze Doors
The three arches of the Entrance Porch end at three massive bronze doors covered with a design of rich sculptural ornament. The subjects are Tradition, The Art of Printing, and Writing. Taken together as a sequential series, Tradition, Writing, and Printing, are the "gradually more perfect" ways that humans have preserved religion, history, literature, and science.
Tradition (left-hand door)
Tradition illustrates how knowledge was originally handed down from generation to generation. In the lunette above the door, an American Indian, a Norseman, a prehistoric man, and a shepherd listen intently to the words of the central figure. Each of these lunette figures represents peoples who kept their history alive via oral tradition.
The Art of Printing (center door)
The lunette above the door: "Minerva Diffusing the Products of Typographical Art." Minerva, the Roman goddess of learning and wisdom, is seated in the center. The Latin title of the subject, Ars Typographica can be seen in the background. The figures on the door panels represent the Humanities and Intellect.
Writing (right-hand door)
In the lunette above the doors, the four figures surrounding the central figure represent people who have influenced the world through their written literature: an Egyptian and a Jew and a Christian and a Greek. The figures on the door panels below represent Truth and Research.
The Ceiling
The names of ten great authors are inscribed on tablets above the Great Hall's semicircular windows in the vaulted cove of the ceiling:
DANTE, HOMER, MILTON, BACON, ARISTOTLE, GOETHE, SHAKESPEARE, MOLIERE, MOSES, and HERODOTUS.
The names of eight more authors are inscribed in gilt letters on tablets beneath the second-story cartouches:
CERVANTES, HUGO, SCOTT, COOPER, LONGFELLOW, TENNYSON, GIBBON, and BANCROFT.
The East Mosaic Corridor and Entrance to the Main Reading Room
In the East Corridor six lunettes depict The Evolution of the Book. The subjects are, at the south end, the Cairn, Oral Tradition, and Egyptian Hieroglyphics; and, at the north end, Picture Writing, the Manuscript Book, and the Printing Press.
In the vault mosaics, at the ends and along the sides, are ten trophies, each with symbols representing one of the arts or sciences:
MATHEMATICS, ASTRONOMY, ENGINEERING, NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, ARCHITECTURE, MUSIC, PAINTING, SCULPTURE, POETRY, and NATURAL SCIENCE.
In the painting above the central door to the Reading Room, titled Government and representing the ideal state, the figure of Good Government holds a plaque on which is inscribed a quote from Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, "A government of the people, by the people, and for the people." Two paintings explaining the practical working of government flank each side of this central image. To the left, Corrupt Legislation leads to Anarchy (the scroll of learning is burning in Anarchy's right hand, and she is trampling on a scroll, a lyre, a Bible, and a book); to the right, Good Administration (the youth on the right, educated by the books he is carrying, is casting his ballot into the urn) leads to Peace and Prosperity.
The Eight Symbolic Statues and Their Inscriptions
Eight large statues above the giant marble columns represent eight categories of knowledge, each considered symbolic of civilized life and thought. Their titles are inscribed in gilt letters on a tablet in the friez below them: Philosophy, Art, History, Commerce, Religion, Science, Law, and Poetry.
Above the figure of Philosophy
THE INQUIRY, KNOWLEDGE, AND BELIEF OF TRUTH
IS THE SOVEREIGN GOOD OF HUMAN NATURE.
Bacon, Essays, "Of Truth"
Above the figure of Art
AS ONE LAMP LIGHTS ANOTHER, NOR GROWS LESS,
SO NOBLENESS ENKINDLETH NOBLENESS.
Lowell, Yussouf
Above the figure of History
ONE GOD, ONE LAW, ONE ELEMENT, AND ONE FAR-OFF DIVINE EVENT,
TO WHICH THE WHOLE CREATION MOVES
Tennyson, In Memoriam
Above the figure of Commerce
WE TASTE THE SPICES OF ARABIA YET NEVER FEEL
THE SCORCHING SUN WHICH BRINGS THEM FORTH.
Anon. [Dudley North, East India Trade]
Above the figure of Religion
WHAT DOTH THE LORD REQUIRE OF THEE, BUT TO DO JUSTLY,
AND TO LOVE MERCY, AND TO WALK HUMBLY WITH THY GOD?
Holy Bible, Micah 6:8
Above the figure of Science
THE HEAVENS DECLARE THE GLORY OF GOD;
AND THE FIRMAMENT SHEWETH HIS HANDIWORK.
Holy Bible, Psalms 19:1
Above the figure of Law
OF LAW THERE CAN BE NO LESS ACKNOWLEDGED
THAN THAT HER VOICE IS THE HARMONY OF THE WORLD.
Richard Hooker
Above the figure of Poetry
HITHER, AS TO THEIR FOUNTAIN, OTHER STARS REPAIRING,
IN THEIR GOLDEN URNS DRAW LIGHT.
Milton, Paradise Lost, vii, 364
The Sixteen Bronze Statues
Sixteen bronze statues set along the balustrade of the galleries represent men renowned for their accomplishments in the categories of knowledge and activity described above. The statues are paired, each pair flanking one of the eight giant marble columns. The names of individual figures are inscribed on the wall directly behind the statue. The list of those selected as representatives of human thought and civilization follows.
Philosophy
PLATO and BACON
Art
MICHAELANGELO
BEETHOVEN
History
HERODOTUS
GIBBON
Commerce
COLUMBUS
FULTON
Religion
ST. PAUL
MOSES
Science
NEWTON
HENRY
Law
SOLON
KENT
Poetry
SHAKESPEARE
HOMER
According to Greek mythology, the Muses were the goddesses of various departments of Art, Poetry, and Science. Apollo, the god of song, was their father, and Mnemosyne (Memory) their mother. Their names are Melpomene (Tragedy), Clio (History), Thalia (Comedy and Bucolic Poetry), Euterpe (Lyric Song), Terpsichore (Dancing), Erato (Love Poetry), Polyhymia (Sacred Song), Urania (Astronomy), and Calliope (Epic Poetry).
In what is called “THE LIBRARIAN'S ROOM” the central disc of the domed ceiling contains a painting representing Letters. The following sentence is inscribed on a streamer:
LITERA SCRIPTA MANET [The written word endures]
There are four additional circular paintings in the dome:
IN TENEBRIS LUX [In darkness light]
LIBER DELECTATIO ANIMAE [Books, the delight of the soul]
EFFICIUNT CLARUM STUDIO [They make it clear by study]
DULCE ANTE OMNIA MUSAE [The Muses, above all things, delightful]
The Library of Babel: A Primordial Scattering
We turn now from the classical idea of the library as an orderly, well-organized repository of all the best that has been thought or written, a library dedicated to the power of words and books to enlighten us and free us from intellectual and spiritual confinement. Consider instead what it might be like for a library to be random, disorganized, endless, incoherent, with no discernable principle of organization or order.
“The Library of Babel” by Jorges Luis Borges, is one of his short, parable-like “fictions,” enigmatic metaphysical speculations on the world; in a mere eight pages he develops the idea of the universe as a library (Borges was himself the director of the national library of Argentina). His imaginary library is infinite, with endless shelves of books made up of every possible combination of letters and words, most of which exhibit a “formless and chaotic nature, … with leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences.” There is no selection criteria or process for books in this library; it is complete, with every conceivable book equally included, and with no judgment on their quality or value. Everything has already been written, so there is no room for individual achievement or new entries: “The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms.” There is something monstrously inhuman and impersonal about the Library of Babel, and thus of the universe which it represents or reveals. The Library of Babel is the very antithesis of the Library of Congress.
The true significance of Borges’ Library of Babel lies in its name, which alludes to the city of Babel in the biblical account of Genesis 11. The library of Babel and Babel’s infamous tower are complementary structures, both exhibiting a primordial scattering. We have seen that Donne’s reference to “all our scattered leaves,” as well as Coleridge’s reference to the “scattered state” of his poems, can be traced to the Cumaean Sibyl’s scattering of leaves in her prophetic messages, but in fact the first historical instance of such “scattering” occurs in the biblical account of Genesis 11 regarding Babel.
The story of Babel begins in the early chapters of Genesis, when “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.” The citizens of Babel had ambitions to rival God, a hubristic desire “to build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven.” “let us make us a name,” they said, “lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” The project of building the tower, then, is precisely motivated by the fear of being scattered, dispersed throughout the world. Genesis gives the following account:
The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
The biblical story, though brief, reveals a totalizing culture, when “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.” Yet the uniformity and single-minded arrogance of Babel led to its downfall. Its project of civic unity—“lest we be scattered abroad”—falls apart into a mindless multiplicity of languages; ironically, in the people’s failure to communicate with one another they are scattered abroad.
The Tower of Babel has been a popular subject for artists through the ages; here are two examples, one by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and another, The Confusion of Tongues, by Gustave Doré. Bruegel’s painting is too large for Substack, but here is the Wikipedia link to it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_of_Babel_(Bruegel)
Bruegel’s tower is a great, skyscraper-like edifice, dwarfing the laborers on the ground below. The Lord has not yet confounded the language of the citizens of Babel; the tower is still a working dream in their collective mind, still a work in progress. In the foreground the royalty of the city oversees workers preparing cut stone; some of the workers prostrate themselves before the powerful rulers. Doré’s The Confusion of Tongues depicts the Tower of Babel after the confusion of speech. The tower looms over the workers, some of whom are pushing a wagon of stones, still engaged in their labor. But the men in the foreground are in various postures of despair, with one man raising his arms toward heaven to supplicate God Himself.
The Confusion of Tongues, by Gustave Doré, depicting the Tower of Babel
Here are some representative selections from Borges’ eight-page “Library of Babel.”3
"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. . ."
"Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth. I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues. . . I say that the Library is unending. The idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect, their words obscure. This cyclical book is God.)"
"When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon."
"At that time it was also hoped that a clarification of humanity’s basic mysteries—the origin of the Library and of time—might be found."
"As was natural, this inordinate hope was followed by an excessive depression. The certitude that some shelf in some hexagon held precious books and that these precious books were inaccessible, seemed almost intolerable . . . It does not seem unlikely to me that there is a total book on some shelf of the universe; I pray to the unknown gods that a man—just one, even though it were thousands of years ago!—may have examined and read it. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified."
"The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letters. . . . Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species—the unique species—is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret."
"Letizia Álverez de Toledo has observed that this vast Library is useless: rigorously speaking, a single volume would be sufficient, a volume of ordinary format, printed in nine or ten point type, containing an infinite number of infinitely thin leaves. . . . The handling of this silky vade mecum would not be convenient: each apparent page would unfold into other analogous ones; the inconceivable middle page would have no reverse."
It is fitting that Babel should have a library as an adjunct to its tower, for just as a tower seeks to achieve a comprehensive bird’s-eye perspective over its domain, so too the aim of a library is to embrace the totality of knowledge. However, Babel’s tower and library were both corrupted; the tower has become a symbol of man’s futile attempts to transcend all limits, while the library is now an infinite and random scattering of “orthographical symbols,” a confounding of speech without meaning, understanding, or sense.
Part Three of John Donne’s Three Images of Humanity: Humanity as a Continent
Donne’s Seventeenth Meditation from his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions develops three different images of humanity. We have explored two of them: humanity as members of a body, and humanity as books in a library. Subsequent to Donne, those images have been distorted or undone; the affirmation that “We are members of one body,” with its rich Christian connotations, has been replaced with the bland sentence “We do not live alone.” The coherence and order essential to a classical library is lost, as we have just witnessed in Borges’ nightmarish vision, replaced by meaningless books that mock and frustrate all efforts to attain knowledge or truth.
We will now conclude with Donne’s third image: humans, not as isolated islands, but rather as parts of a single continent. This passage from Donne is, no doubt, the one most familiar to modern ears, giving us the oft-quoted concluding line, “never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.” Here is the passage in full:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
Donne argues here for the unity of all mankind, and thus for the solidarity that we should have with one another. His is a social and political vision of a commonwealth in which every life is precious, in which respect for the individual, for property, and for the land are equally crucial, and where any loss is grievous. But it is also a specifically Christian vision of a world founded on the brotherhood of mankind bearing the image of God, a world in which I can identify with another person, even unto death. It is the world of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, in which Sydney Carton dies on the guillotine in the place of another man. It is the world in which Jesus’ death can be understood theologically as a substitutionary atonement, as Christ taking my place.
In modern times, Donne’s vision of human mutuality still has the power to inspire—we can think, for instance, of Hemingway’s explicit debt to Donne in his novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. However, the overwhelming tendency now is to think of ourselves as solitary creatures, cut off from each other, alienated from one another and from the world. We are no longer limbs of one body, or books in one library, or parts of one continent. To appreciate the radical difference between Donne’s sensibility and our modern one we can turn to Matthew Arnold’s very Victorian poem of alienation, To Marguerite: Continued.
To Marguerite: Continued
Yes! in the sea of life enisled,With echoing straits between us thrown,Dotting the shoreless watery wild,We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,And then their endless bounds they know.But when the moon their hollows lights,And they are swept by balms of spring,And in their glens, on starry nights,The nightingales divinely sing;And lovely notes, from shore to shore,Across the sounds and channels pour—Oh! then a longing like despairIs to their farthest caverns sent;For surely once, they feel, we wereParts of a single continent!Now round us spreads the watery plain—Oh might our marges meet again!Who order'd, that their longing's fireShould be, as soon as kindled, cool'd?Who renders vain their deep desire?—A God, a God their severance ruled!And bade betwixt their shores to beThe unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.—Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
This poem stands as an explicit reply to Donne’s affirmation that we are all “a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” To Donne’s confident “No man is an island” Arnold replies that we are “in the sea of life enisled”—that is, we exist as mere isles, separated by “echoing straits.” The first stanza sums up the human condition for Arnold: “We mortal millions live alone.” The second and third stanzas have a “when—then” structure: when the natural world is full of loveliness and beauty, and the nightingales “divinely sing,” then we suffer a “longing like despair,” for then we sense that we were once “parts of a single continent!” The fourth stanza blames “a God” for making the world like this, in which our desires are never fulfilled, forever thwarted; between us and other people there is nothing, we are merely isolated islands, scattered like leaves across the “unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.”
Another bleak statement by Matthew Arnold occurs at the end of his poem, “Dover Beach”:
… the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Arnold’s heroic, tragic vision of the world, with its crushing negations and denials, shows how far we have drifted from Donne’s affirmations. It is a profoundly disheartening expression of modern life. Yet Arnold, writing in the Victorian Era, has not entirely lost Donne’s language of metaphor and analogy; he can still compare the human condition to geographic features of the earth—islands, continents, and seas. But unlike Donne, Arnold sees humanity as an archipelago of isolated islands scattered over an empty expanse of water. Is it possible to reverse the scattering? Can bridges be constructed to connect our many islands, as highway US 1 connects the Florida Keys with the mainland? The bridges we need are metaphoric, the bridges of language, so that we can speak meaningfully and truthfully to each other across the sea of life. Arnold offers only a string of denials; for him the world has “neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” We desperately need to recover Donne’s vision of the world, in which we are connected to each other and to the world: members of a body, books in a library, parts of a continent.
John Donne, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne. Ed. Charles M. Coffin. New York: The Modern Library, 1952.
Michel Henry, Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh. Trans. Karl Hefty. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2015, pp. 98, 106.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel.” In Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. Trans. James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964. 51-58.
Lloyd- Thanks for sharing this. I particularly love both the visual and the depth of this piece. But the Jefferson building might be my favorite part. Hope you're well this week. Cheers, -Thalia