Wander.

Spitzweg, The Bookworm, 1850

Those who wander are always objects of suspicion and sometimes even of fear.

Peter Ackroyd, from Hawksmoor

Happy Birthday, Browning

Spitzweg, The Poor Poet, 1839

Books, books, books!

I had found the secret of a garret room

Piled high with cases in my father’s name;

Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and out

Among the giant fossils of my past,

Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs

Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there

At this or that box, pulling through the gap,

In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,

The first book first. And how I felt it beat

Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark,

An hour before the sun would let me read!

My books!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, born on this day in 1806

Antilibrary.

Spitweg, The Bookworm, 1851

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Holds.

Spitzweg, The Witch’s Ride, 1875

May Jack-o-lanterns burning bright

      Of soft and golden hue

      Pierce through the future's veil and show

      What fate now holds for you.

By goblins of the cornfield stark

      By witches dancing on the green

      By pumpkins grinning in the dark

      I wish you luck this Hallowe’en.

Old Hallowe'en verse

Retreats.

Spitzweg, The Poor Poet, 1839

All the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired, and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell. And when we reach the very end of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to the regions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial. But in the daydream itself, the recollection of moments of confined, simple, shut-in space are experiences of heartwarming space, of a space that does not seek to become extended, but would like above all still to be possessed. In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in summer. Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say through what syncretism the attic is at once small and large, warm and cool, always comforting

Gaston Bachelard, from The Poetics of Space

Suddenly.

Spitzweg, The Bookworm, 1857

His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.

Ray Bradbury, from Farewell Summer