Philip Harvey
He stares into the past that made him. We are all doing
this, increasingly as we grow older. We have to find a way to explain how we
got here. Our experience slowly informs us that there was a time before our own
experience, to which we also belong. He stares from 1562 at a lifetime of
transformations. Water can be turned into wine but clay still cannot be turned
into gold. Not everything pleases him, it can never be all pleasure, yet he
knows he belongs to discovery and its consequent treasures. He is full of this
discovery, it has made him, we could almost say. He stares across the Atlantic
Ocean to what nature does that is different and equally abundant. Within him he
contains that information, though he calls it Legend and Report and Assay and
Proclamation and Statute. Certainly, nothing in his own constitution would be
quite the same without discovery, or its companions, conquest and exploitation.
From 1562 the past is a tumult that he would rather keep under wraps. Why, only
in living memory England has closed its monasteries and Germany has freely set
up its own church and friends of his remember their grandparents talk about the
end of the East at Byzantium. The Emperor here in Prague is restless for
knowledge too, permitting into his orbit every kind of theorist and
experimenter, as if he were the centre of the universe. It is not altogether
with a clear equanimity or composure that the Librarian knows these tumults are
related to books. That it was books in increasing numbers that enhanced
discovery of the differences in people’s minds. He keeps himself together, he
doesn’t fall in a heap, has at least these things to keep him going. But
authority has come at a cost. His identity must resolve contradictions between
one page and the next, or at least live with those contradictions. 1562 stares
at the past as at a dream of lost glories. The ruins of the ancients keep him
on his mettle. For even though manuscripts are old hat and the scroll could
belong in one of the Emperor’s cabinets of catchy curiosities, he must not
become conceited. It would be dangerous to presume that you know it all; people
like that often finish up being thrown out the window, especially in Prague,
where it is a more effective solution than exile.
He belongs in the present and can do no other. We are all
doing this, possibilities reach out to impossibility. Probability thrashes it
out with improbability. His masters want to emulate the ancients, why the
Emperor himself would be the King of May. It is a topsy-turvy world, for sure.
The green mantle over his left shoulder is that of a Habsburg prince. He though
is not a prince but a philosopher, grinding out the slow meal for a new recipe
of life. The mantle is stylish, it sends the message. But like the rest of him,
it belongs in the present where rust and moth destroy, where princes give with
one hand and take with the other. He would copy the prince, he also values his
status. In 1562, that can amount to an impressive library. Books made him and
he is made of books. Splendid things every week come to his attention. How
solid is the present. Or should that be a question? How solid is the present?
Carefully bound books seem a sure assertion of his place. Those papers that are
his fingers write the laws we belong with. It’s all impressive enough, but is
there not something stiff in the manner? Is he too straight-up-and-down to be
believable? And will we ever know what he really thinks? Is he, for all his
show of knowledge, a closed book? Outside in the streets of Prague the market
is orderly racket, a walkway of vivid bartering, somewhere for animals to huff
and toy stars to explode. The Vltava is rowdy with geese and trading boats.
Whereas in here the silence is closed in. And anyway it’s never like this the
rest of the time. Only now has he collected himself together sufficiently to
stand a chance with posterity. Most times he’s all over the place, Philosophy
at the window over there, History where it happens beyond the stairs, Law when
something very wrong happens, only how wrong? His Science side is waiting for
updates, his Theology looks tight but will it stand the next test? Why, his whole
being could collapse into the proverbial, or turn into a pile of tomes for
re-shelving. So for the moment he keeps a straight face, combines an aura of
knowledge with a figure resolute with a little brief authority.
He stares into the future, that will be totally unfair to
all his achievements. We are the future, for example, who do not know what he
really wants to achieve and cannot imagine what a Librarian in 1562 might
possibly be up to, and will not care a fig. Just as we care not a fig for the Emperor
looking like a green grocer’s window, though we find him curious enough. In his
coat of many covers, the Librarian projects the certainties of 1562. Rumours of
war, signs in the heavens, the brilliant carnivale of the court – these seem at
times just a side product of the certainty of these books. They are the very
latest technology, their beings inside and out a testament to the greatness of
the new. Some of us gaze in wonder, some of us check the price tags. His future
is something we know more about than he can guess, but who are we only
hindsighters? By the time it is agreed that the Earth goes around the sun and
the sun is a minor star and let’s turn the page, he will have been taken from
his imperious place in the palace, heaved across the frozen Baltic Sea, and
stacked up in Swedish obscurity. He, who entertained to a nicety the courtiers
and boffins of the sparkling age, will rest quietly as an outdated
encyclopaedia, if that, for the occasional attention of humourless
rationalists. The snow will fall outside. 1562 will be 1625 will be 1652 and so
forth. He will be like a joke that has gone flat with time and is not even
funny anymore, a joke that another age enjoyed till it split its sides. His
future is to be defined by the cut of his cloth. His books are the limit of
what was known, not the limitlessness he felt he embodied. And yet the future
will not be blind to his existence. It will ponder him as a conundrum, a quirk
of humanism, the necessary manager of new thoughts. Even his outfit may come
back into fashion, or sprout leaves to reveal the true nature of his calling.
The future will try to make a context in which to understand, even if context
disappeared or ‘disapapered’ (as the Irish Portmanteau, himself a montage,
would say) under Thirty Years of unloving unneighbourly War. The future will
try to rewrite the Librarian and in the process make up a new Librarian who is
one more collation of collective thoughts. The future flew in the body of a
huge metal bird all the way to the fishing town of Stockholm, just to walk down
the gilt passageway where the Librarian waits, ready for the latest reference
question, ready to show you what he has in store.
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