Alexandria, January 1495
The great library has been gone for over a thousand years by several accounts and by different fires at different times, which is how destruction usually works: not one catastrophic moment but a series of smaller ones that accumulate until what was there is not there anymore and no single person can be fully blamed. This is how I have watched many valuable things disappear.
But the echo is here. In the smaller collections, the private libraries, the manuscripts preserved by scholars who understood that the survival of knowledge requires a certain kind of stubborn, unremarked devotion: copying, protecting, moving, hiding. I have been here for three weeks reading in four different collections and everything I read is in conversation with something I read in Constantinople, and that is in conversation with something from the Medici library in Florence, and the whole thing is one interrupted library that has been surviving itself across fifteen hundred years.
I feel, in these rooms, something close to what I imagine devotion is supposed to feel like. Not toward a god. Toward the project of understanding, which is the one human project I have not been able to conclude is ultimately hopeless. Empires collapse. Religions corrupt. But the project of reading what the world contains, asking what it means, and writing down what you find: I cannot give that one up.
I am filling three notebooks. I will need more. There is more here than three months can contain.