A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.
Interpretation
A library continuously expands and evolves through various means, including acquiring books and inspiring learning.
Alberto Manguel's quote highlights the dynamic and self-sustaining nature of libraries. They grow not just through the purchase of new books but also through donations, loans, and the connections made between texts. This reflects the idea that a library is not just a static collection of resources but a living entity that stimulates curiosity and knowledge, adapting to the needs and contributions of its community.
In practice
During a speech at a community event about the importance of libraries.
The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more.
From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.
One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.
It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement. In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long. Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.
My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.
A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.
The mother is the first teacher of the child. The message she gives that child, that child gives to the world.
Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).
We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.
It was a day and age that saw no reason why one could not learn whatever was required - learn vitally anything - by the close study of books.
No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.
Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.
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