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.
The good news is we have the technology and the tools to alleviate poverty on a global scale. All that is standing in our way is education and will.
In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you.
I have two rules for a great book: make me think and make me smile.
One good schoolmaster is worth a thousand priests.
The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.
It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible.
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