Petrarch and the Magical Space of the Library
Extract from :
Lina Bolzoni
A Marvelous Solitude
“I Can Never Satisfy My Hunger for Books”
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Reading was for Petrarch a passionate love affair that one could not forswear, not even when threatened with all the torments of Hell. The way such a passion unfolds and the forms it assumes are minutely described, starting with the unique pleasures reading affords: “I can never satisfy my hunger for books,”
Petrarch explains to Giovanni dell’ Incisa, probably around 1346,
“and perhaps I already own more than I should; but with books it is just the same as with other things: the more we obtain what we have been looking for, the more our greed is stimulated. In fact, there is something special about books. Gold, silver, precious stones, purple robes, palaces of marble, well-tended fields, paintings, palfreys with all their trappings, and all other such things give a silent and superficial pleasure; books instead please inwardly; they speak with us and confer with us, they attach themselves to us, that is, with a lively and penetrating familiarity.”
The pleasure of reading is, Petrarch feels, more intimate and more intense than the satisfaction afforded by other worldly goods: its joy, which gets to the marrow itself, is the joy of a conversation, its pleasure stemming from the dialogue a book sets up with its reader. What is particularly relevant here is the way Petrarch rearticulates the theme of speaking books, so that this becomes a focal point in his portrayal of himself as a reader-writer; in doing so, he also performs the task of importing the models of orality and interpersonal exchange into the heart of modern book culture, into the very core of burgeoning humanism. We may see this strategy as implicitly answering the accusations leveled by Plato’s Phaedrus against the written text (274b–275b), branded as an artificial repository of memory, fixed and undialogical. In the tradition that Petrarch crucially contributes to establishing, the book speaks, dialogues with its reader, because it is seen as something alive, because it carries within it the soul of its author.
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The almost physical pleasure that Petrarch describes as being produced by reading has important links, as Andrea Torre has shown, with the practice of lege memoriter, a method of reading aimed at imprinting texts in the memory and transforming them into a living and essential part not only of the reader’s mind but also of their body. An age-old metaphor compared reading to a form of eating — rumination; in a letter to Boccaccio, Petrarch takes up this idea and infuses it with new strength as he dwells on the possibility that books may penetrate to our very marrow:
I have read what is said in Virgil, Horace, Boethius and Cicero not once but countless times, nor was my reading rushed but leisurely, pondering them as I went with all the powers of my intellect; I ate in the morning what I would digest in the evening, I swallowed as a boy what I would ruminate upon as an older man. I have thoroughly absorbed these writings, implanting them not only in my memory but in my marrow, and they have so become one with my mind that were I never to read them for the remainder of my life, they would cling to me, having taken root in the innermost recesses of my mind.
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Because books offer a faithful image of their author’s soul, they carry the author within them so vividly that they become the instruments of an actual evocation. This is a component of metaphorical invention often deployed by Petrarch. It emerges importantly in a 1352 letter to Lapo da Castiglionchio the Elder, in which, to quote Paola Vecchi Galli’s felicitous formulation, “an unexpected catalogue of phantasmal presences evoked by reading, a host of ancient authors materializes next to Cicero, Petrarch’s favorite Latin guest:
As is my custom, I recently withdrew to my transalpine Helicon in order to escape the pressures of that detestable city. I brought with me your Cicero, who, astonished by the novelty of the place, confessed that he was never surrounded, to use his words, by icier waters in his Arpinium than he was with me at the source of the Sorgue.… This is why your Cicero seemed delighted and gladly remained with me. We spent ten thoroughly peaceful and tranquil days there together.… My guest was surrounded by countless illustrious and distinguished men who, aside from the Greeks, included our Romans, Brutus, Atticus, Herennius.… There was his brother, Quintus Cicero …; his son, Marcus Cicero …, the orator Hortensius, Epicurus.
The numerous company that follows Cicero — and with him Petrarch — is made up of those authors with whom Cicero dialogues in his works: the model of reading-writing as a dialogue once again produces in this passage an illusionistic, and strongly theatrical, effect. It is as if a crowd of ghostly presences flowed out of the pages of the manuscripts Petrarch had brought with him to Vaucluse. He adopted similar tones in a 1366 letter to Boccaccio, in which he rejoiced on receiving the Latin translation of Homer by Leonzio Pilato, who had died in 1364:
“I close by telling you that your Homer, now in Latin, has finally reached me — which renews my love for the sender and my memory, my sighs for the translator; it has filled me and all those who inhabit this library, be they Greek or Latin, with wonderful joy and delight.”
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Petrarch’s library is described as the place where pleasures unknown to all others are pursued, where friends are met and entertained whom no one else can know or see. It becomes the magical site par excellence, where time and space contract (some “secret friends” who “come to [him] from every century / And every land” are welcomed). The exaltation of the encyclopedic knowledge that the library contains (all the various genres and
the different types of books are listed) goes hand in hand with a highlighting of the paucity of the physical space: Vaucluse and once again, as in a game of Chinese boxes, the little room where the books are kept (“the humblest shelter is for them a mansion”).
These book-friends are able not only to furnish all that is needed in the various fields of knowledge but also to provide psychological comfort and moral instruction; they have one
important advantage over flesh-and-blood friends: they are entirely subjected to the needs of their host, always ready and eager to answer his many questions. Here the theme of the dialogue with books is expressed through the use of different verbs that correspond, as Loredana Chines has argued, to the different genres and functions of the books in the poet’s
collection: “respondent thus seems to be deployed in connection with theological and philosophical texts, which answer men’s questions and speculative investigations; canunt is the verb used in connection with epic poetry, which deals with the great deeds of gods and men; while loquuntur describes human narration, the earth-bound word which tells the story of ordinary men and their world.”
To take refuge in one’s library, to converse with one’s books, is, after all, as we have seen, an efficacious remedy against the anguish inflicted by the ghost of love, which continuously
tempts and besieges “the citadel of the heart.”
Vaucluse and the library are celebrated in a similar way in a passage from a letter to Zanobi da Strada, which seems datable to 1353. The library is the place where one can seek solace from the misery of exile, the ideal fatherland where the tormenting present may be swept away:
As I said, I am at the source of the Sorgue.… Meanwhile here I have established my Rome, my Athens, and my spiritual fatherland; here I gather all the friends I now have or did have, not only those who have proved themselves through intimate contact and who have lived with me, but also those who died many centuries ago, known to me only
through their writings, wherein I marvel at their accomplishments and their spirits or at their customs and lives or at their eloquence and genius. I gather them from every land and every age in this narrow valley, conversing with them more willingly than with those who think they are alive because they see traces of their stale breath in the frosty air. I thus wander free and unconcerned, alone with such companions; I am where I wish to be. As much as possible, I remain alone with myself.
Yet again Vaucluse is the place chosen to function as a library; here the mind re-creates an ideal homeland where the significant sites of antiquity (in this case Athens and Rome) come together. Petrarch describes the unification of different times and places that he achieves here in almost magical, alchemical terms (“I gather them, from every land and every age
in this narrow valley”), and once more it is the smallness, indeed the modesty, of the place that renders even more evident the extraordinary character of the operation.
The superiority of mental friends created through books compared with physical people is reaffirmed quite harshly, with an aside on bad breath that accentuates the poet’s aristocratic detachment. As a bulwark against the limits and grossness of the contemporary world, Petrarch seeks to build an ideal community that may be formed outside the limits of space and time and peopled by his chosen interlocutors. The dialogue with books, as we shall see in greater detail later, is also nurtured through a sense of being unsuited to one’s times, a feeling, almost, of extraneousness and alienation.
Let us look now at a passage from De vita solitaria in which Petrarch celebrates two central aspects of his dialogue with books: the unique pleasures this exchange yields and the complete availability of his interlocutors, that is, their authors:
I also look for various kinds of books that are, because of who they were written by and the subjects they cover, pleasant and regular companions. These books are ready to be seen in public or go back into the drawer at your command, and are always willing to be silent or to speak, to stay at home or accompany you into the woods, to travel, to spend time in the country, to chat, joke, encourage, comfort, advise, reprimand or take care of you; to teach you the secrets of things, impress on you the memory of great deeds and the rules of moral living, contempt for death, the need for moderation in good fortune, strength in adversity; to instruct you to be imperturbable and constant. They are learned, joyful, helpful and eloquent companions: with them there is no tedium, no expense, no complaints, no murmurs, no envy, no deceit. And while they offer so many advantages, they are satisfied with the smallest room in your house and a modest robe, they require no drink or food; indeed it is they who offer their guests invaluable spiritual riches, vast abodes for the soul, sumptuous clothes, pleasant banquets and the sweetest of viands.
When compared with the previously quoted passage from the letter to Giacomo Colonna, this passage shows an artificial crescendo of effects: not only, Petrarch argues, are books friends without flaws, who content themselves with little or nothing and show an infinite willingness to submit to his will, but it is they themselves — and this is a significant reversal — who furnish infinite wealth and splendid abodes and host rich banquets. This is an idea that Federico da Montefeltro evoked in the inscription he placed above his library.
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