At this point in my wondering I used to devise a scene from around
the year 2020. It was Sunday afternoon (or, if the working week had
shrunk as forecast, a Monday or even a Tuesday afternoon). Someone
vaguely like myself, a man who had failed at what he most wanted to
do, was standing in gloomy twilight before a wall of bookshelves. The
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man did not know it, but he happened to be the last person on the
planet who still owned a copy of a certain book that had been composed on grey Sunday afternoons forty years before. The same man had once actually read the book, many years before the afternoon
when he searched for it on his shelves. And more than this, he still
remembered vaguely a certain something about the book.
There is no word for what this man remembers — it is so faint, so
hardly perceptible among his other thoughts. But I stop (in my own
thinking, on many a Sunday afternoon) to ask myself what it is exactly
that the man still possesses of my book. I reassure myself that the
something he half-remembers must be just a little different from all
the other vague somethings in his memory. And then I think about the
man’s brain.
I know very little about the human brain. In all my three thousand
books there is probably no description of a brain. If someone counted
in my books the occurrence of nouns referring to parts of the body,
‘brain’ would probably have a very low score. And yet I have bought
all those books and read nearly half of them and defended my reading of them because I believe my books can teach me all I need to know about how people think and feel.
I think freely about the brain of the man standing in front of his
bookshelves and trying to remember: trying (although he does not
know it) to rescue the last trace of my own writing — to save my
thought from extinction. 1 know that this thinking of mine is, in a way,
false. But I trust my thinking just the same, because I am sure my own
brain is helping me to think; and I cannot believe that one brain could
be quite mistaken about another of its kind.
I think of the man’s brain as made up of many cells. Each cell is like
a monk’s cell in a Carthusian monastery, with high walls around it and
a little garden between the front wall and the front door. (The Carthusians are almost hermits; each monk belongs to the monastery, but he spends most of his day reading in his cell or tending the vegetables in
his walled garden.) And each cell is a storehouse of information; each
cell is crammed with books.
A few books are cloth-bound with paper jackets, but most are
leather-bound. And far outnumbering the books are tire manuscripts.
(I have trouble envisaging the manuscripts. One of my own books —
in my room, on the grey Sunday afternoon — has photographs of
pages from an illuminated manuscript. But I wonder what a collection of such pages would look like and how it would be bound. And I have no idea how a collection of such bound manuscripts would be
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stored — lying flat, on top of one another? sideways? upright in ranks
like cloth-bound books on my own shelves? I wonder too what sort of
furniture would store or display the manuscripts. So, although I can
see each monk in his cell reaching up to his shelf of books from more
recent times, when I want to think of him searching among the bulk
of his library I see only a greyness: the grey of the monk’s robe, of the
stone walls of his cell, of the afternoon sky at his little window, and the
greyness of blurred and incomprehensible texts.)
There are very few Carthusian monks in the world — I mean, the
world outside my window and under the grey sky on Sunday
afternoon. But when I say that, I am only repeating what a priest told
me at secondary school nearly thirty years ago, when I was dreaming
of becoming a monk and living in a library with a little garden and a
wall around me. Apart from the priest’s vague answer, the only information I have about the Carthusian O rder comes from an article in the English Geographical Magazine. But that article was published in the
1930s, at about the time when I was learning to read in my other lifetime that leads back towards the Age of Books. I cannot check the article now because all my old magazines are wrapped in grey plastic garbage bags and stored above the ceiling of my house. I stored them
there three years ago with four hundred books that I will never read
again — I needed more space on my shelves for the latest books I was
buying.
W hat I mainly remember about that article was that it was all text
with no photographs. Nowadays the Geographical Magazine is half-filled
with coloured photographs. I sometimes skip the brief, jargonised
texts of the articles and find all I need to know in the captions under
the photographs. But the 1930s magazines (in the grey plastic bag, in
the twilight above the ceiling over my head) included many an article
with not one illustration. I imagine the authors of those articles as
bookish chaps in tweeds, returning from strolls among hedgerows to
sit
