Murder and Mayhem Under Saturn:
Further Thoughts on Books and Libraries

I finished the paperback mystery I had brought on the plane over last night with a great rush of pleasure. I’m not sure why: the plotting was somewhat lackluster, the dénouement hurried. About the only good thing about the whole piece had been the delightful lack of the obligatory and ponderous bedroom scenes that so clutter up modern literature. And possibly its setting, the chill, exotic reaches of the Yukon in the midst of a dogsled race.

Still, I found myself, as I drifted in and out of sleep, struck by a deep sense of frustration at the thought I hadn’t bothered to bring another one. I wanted to go back, to undo my slavish, rushed reading, to hoard the precious text and distill it a little—only a little—each day.

On top of that I realized I’d left at home my little bare-bones survival library—G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and the complete works of Jorge Luis Borges. I’d been agonizing for months before about forgetting them, and looked forward to having them back this semester. I lay there awake for a
while, and eventually a short prayer to little Aggie, St. Agnes, started to put things back in perspective.

Just books. Silly, I guess.

It’s strange the cravings you get abroad, away from home and familiar voices. Maybe it was just naked biblioholism. I doubt it, though. It wasn’t just a desire for $6.95 mystery paperbacks (notoriously scarce in Europe) that I was giving vent to, that I was losing sleep over.

I’d cut another cord with home, cast aside so soon something I’d carefully carried over 5,000 miles to remind me of Tallahassee, however tenuous the connection. That little book had gotten momentarily tangled up in the vast constellation of hearth and home, of mom and dad and evenings by the fireplace. It was a piece of somewhere else, a memory of an existence independent from the architecture that fills my waking hours.

I love my cornices and my column capitals, but every now and then you need a good mystery and a nice warm bed. A simple, even plebeian pleasure, I suppose, but then even Paul VI liked Agatha Christie.

The post-vacation jitters are traditional for me, I suppose. The first night I spent here back in August, I roamed around the hotel for a long while and finally went to sleep only after I’d spent a calming few minutes looking up at the dome of Sant’ Andrea from the hotel roof, watching the weird sky. Last night, the sky was that same eerie blood-purple it had been so long ago.

This morning, all was well. Except, naturally, I’d wished I could have gone to bed earlier.

Professor D. ended his lecture on our traditional class walking tour from the loggia of the Palazzo Mattei, looking down into the cluttered, antiquity-incrusted courtyard, stony late-Roman emperors studying us from circular tondi. Lush, damp foliage had begun to grow along the elaborately sculpted belt courses. Then I remembered, as he dismissed us, it was the headquarters of the Italian Institute for American Studies, and at least one of my profs had recommended I have a look at the frescoes of their library.

Library. Libraries mean books, and plenty of them. Not likely to carry mysteries about Alaskan dog-sled racers, but nonetheless, it was something I’d been meaning to take care of for a few months now.

So I stepped into the foyer, feeling the wonderful, soothing presence of old paper and English text on the spines. Admitted, most of them were about Native Americans rather than murder-mysteries or spiritual exercises and there seemed to be an acute lack of Dave Barry. But then, one can’t really make booger jokes under a gilded mythological ceiling.

I puttered about with the card catalogue, idly flicking through the cards. Lots of Poe, it looked like; that was something at least, but The Gold Bug didn’t seem like the sort of idle off-duty reading I was looking for. I counted a few Walker Percy novels, which was a bit more promising, but Poe looked like the big draw in the fiction section. If I wanted madness and mayhem and tortured souls, I could just crack open something on Borromini back at Studio.

Yeesh, architects. Never happy.

They’ve even got a whole book on the subject, called Born Under Saturn, available at the miniscule library in Studio. Though at the moment perhaps I’d prefer something a bit cheerier, without a whole chapter on statistics concerning “Suicides of Artists” or another with subheadings on “Weird Hobbies,” “Cleanliness Mania,” and “Florentine Eccentrics of the Early Sixteenth Century.” An acute lack of locked-room murders and oriental paperknives of curious design here.

But back to our story. The place was run on the European system, as the American docent explained to me chattily after I’d spent a few minutes bent over a catalogue drawer. Which meant, of course, no browsing in the stacks. A shocking notion to an American bibliophile like myself.

But then—but then—she was taking me into the stacks, to show me around. Oh—how wonderful—how absolutely wonderful. The long file of rooms stretched far back, receding into darkness, cornice-high shelves ringing the walls, piled high with so many books. It was bliss, absolute bliss. Not that I owned any of them, not that I wanted any of them, but simply that they were there.

I told her I would think about joining, and left the palazzo smiling broadly, gilding the lily by a final ceilingward glance at the splendid frescoes overhead.

Why do we love libraries so? There’s got to be more than a gross love of piled-up paper, a sort of academic materialism at play. A famous bibliophile, whose name escapes me, said that for him, heaven would be “a sort of library,” and perhaps unintentionally, he’d stumbled onto something there.

We love libraries because they are, in a sense, a strange, peripheral sense, a glimpse of the infinite. I’ve spoken of this before, but I didn’t quite understand the theological ramifications of it until today. For, as we move among these shelves, dozens of stories that we have read, or might have read, or might read, crowd close at the edges of consciousness, all at once, and all still unique. It’s a thrill, a wondrous thrill.

It’s a God’s-eye view of creation. I’ve only felt the same way, this same, sustained and highly artificial omniscience in one other place, one summer as I stood overlooking the peaks and mesas of the Grand Canyon as they stretched beyond the horizon. It’s the only place in the world big enough to be seen all at once. Like a library, itself an image of the universe from A to Z.

I’m no saint or seer, but I still think it’s true. For one thing, it also explains why, soon enough, we find ourselves frustrated by the grand choice lying before us, and grudgingly pick out one volume, one precious volume, and take it up to the cash register. Or why we reel away, staggered by the immensity of the great gash in the earth that lies beneath our feet, stretching down for thousands of feet. Omniscience is too much for our little heads to bear, for now at least. And that is a limitation I’ll gladly thank the Lord for.

Oh, yeah, and what weird hobbies, exactly? I might just like that crazy library book anyhow.