| Fast Forward: Your book explores the complex relationship a library often has with itself.
Alberto Manguel: The public library is a social institution and has a purpose. It isn’t exempt from being ill-used. If you ask people if reading and culture are important, they’ll say yes, but not really believe it. Ours is a society where, at its core, the will is to make money, an individual profit – to benefit without distracting from personal gain, removed from any intellectual prestige. What happens is that the library exists, but almost in spite of society.
FFWD: Do you find the reader-as-minority disappointing?
Manguel: That comes with age. The younger generation has such a hard time with the world we’ve left them. I find myself in discussions where I have to begin by arguing that to have time to reflect and question what society gives us as true is a good thing, and that our only chance of survival is to have that constant, awakened activity.
We have always been this paradoxical beast that destroys and constructs. But the side that was able to lament and repent was strong. I’m not sure how strong it is now. In the past, the most barbaric of acts – the gouging out of the eyes of Gloucester, the crucifixion – were always put in a context that did not render it acceptable or esthetically pleasing. Now we have a culture that finds the destruction of the human body not only desirable in a superficial way, but trite. You can’t say that watching thousands of deaths has no effect, but one act of kindness does. It’s a subtle tool that those in power use in order to desensitize us to the suffering of others. It’s not that goodness has disappeared, but it’s harder to learn to be human.
FFWD: Is there a fear that, with reading, we’ll have to lose it before we appreciate it?
Manguel: We all have the capability of intelligence, but it is a muscle we need to develop. There has always been the danger that the young will rebel against their teacher, but it’s what they should do. At the same time, you have to teach people to be stupid. What I find disturbing is that most of what is popular culture today tends to make you stupid, by not requiring you to work – as if difficulty is to be avoided.
FFWD: In the book, you recount the destruction of the library in Baghdad and comment upon the emergence of a mechanized library. With that loss of tangibility, could what we consider to be reading become something else entirely?
Manguel: If you cannot grasp something in the physical sense, it makes it much more difficult to do so intellectually. It can be a positive thing, as long as we don’t look at it as a progress from worst to best, or as the only way.
People think I object to the electronic media – that’s absurd, it’s like saying I object to houses with roofs. What I object to is the idea that I need it for everything, because I don’t. This is part of rendering us stupid – childlike in the worst sense – where you have a patronizing society that gives the illusion you have choice, but don’t really. I think it paradoxical that we think we are freer in front of the Internet rather than a book, when in fact, the Internet only allows us access according to a certain program. A book allows me access in any way I want, at any time – an interactivity that the screen doesn’t have. |
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