If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the contrasting perspectives that a library embodies depending on the time of day, representing order and chaos in knowledge.
Alberto Manguel's quote reflects on the dual nature of libraries and, by extension, knowledge itself. During the day, libraries may symbolize clarity, order, and a structured understanding of the world, suggesting a desire for rationality and reason. Conversely, at night, they embody a sense of joy and accept the chaotic, messy reality of existence, celebrating the richness and complexity of life and learning.
In practice
This quote can be used to inspire students during a library orientation.
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.
A child needs freedom within limits.
The single aim of my life is that every child is:_x000D_ free to be a child,_x000D_ free to grow and develop,_x000D_ free to eat, sleep, see daylight,_x000D_ free to laugh and cry,_x000D_ free to play,_x000D_ free to learn, free to go to school, and above all, free to dream.
Extemporaneous speaking should be practised [sic] and cultivated. It is the lawyer's avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech. And yet there is not a more fatal error to young lawyers than relying too much on speech-making. If any one, upon his rare powers of speaking, shall claim an exemption from the drudgery of the law, his case is a failure in advance.
Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas.
The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.
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