Umberto Eco — "So many books! Have you read them all?"

Selected passages: UMBERTO ECO, Lectio magistralis at the Turin Book Fair, 2007. (English translation of the Italian original.)

Naturally the bibliophile, even one who collects contemporary books, is exposed to the menace of the fool who walks into your home, sees all those shelves, and declares: “So many books! Have you read them all?” Daily experience tells us that this question is asked even by people of a more than satisfactory IQ. Faced with this outrage there exist, to my knowledge, three standard replies.

The first stops the visitor cold and cuts off all relations: “I haven’t read any of them — otherwise why would I keep them here?” It does, however, gratify the intruder by tickling his sense of superiority, and I see no reason to do him that favour.

The second plunges the intruder into a state of inferiority, and it goes: “More, sir, many more!”

The third is a variation on the second, and I use it when I want the visitor to fall prey to painful astonishment. “No,” I tell him, “the ones I’ve already read I keep at the university; these are the ones I have to read by next week.” Since my library numbers fifty thousand volumes, the poor wretch merely tries to hasten the moment of farewell, pleading sudden engagements. What the poor wretch doesn’t know is that a library is not only the place of your own memory, where you keep what you have read, but the place of universal memory, where one day, at the fateful moment, you may find what others have read before you. It is a repository where, at the limit, everything blurs together and produces a vertigo, a cocktail of learned memory.

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Source: libriantichionline.com