Today’s featured image: The reading room of Carolina Rediviva, the main library of Uppsala University.
Sorry for the years-long silence. I was pretty well tied to the shore for a while there, so nothing seemed appropriate to post on the Cast Off, Set Sail page. In case you missed it, I am abroad again. There’s not nearly as much excitement this time as I’ve spent most of the time in places I’ve been before. I’m currently sitting in the wind energy office at Campus Gotland in Visby, Sweden. I’ve spent a lot of hours here over the past few weeks and plan to spend a great deal more in the coming months. I’m perfectly happy with that. It’s a comfortable space, and it is very quiet, which as you’ll probably glean from today’s post is very valuable to me.
Being back in the world of academia has been a humbling experience. Depending on one’s mindset, it can be the opposite, and indeed, the last time I was here, it swelled my head so large, I barely got out the door. Constantly being the judge of others’ work and being treated as an all-knowing expert by clueless university students certainly can give one a false sense of competence. A little time in the real world did me some good (as painful as it was), and I now see that I work side-by-side with veritable geniuses. I am little more than glorified teaching assistant, whose best course of action when faced with any question is to go digging through the mountains of knowledge that the scientific establishment has produced and hope to find the writings of someone far more learned, smarter, and wiser than I. That is no easy task because the overwhelming majority of that mountain is comprised of either ideological sophistry parading as science or specialist research that is ostensibly written in English yet is incomprehensible to my ignorant mind. Even when sifting out all of those, the remaining collection is still effectively infinite in that I could never hope to read any portion of it that would qualify as statistically significant. Yet the process of devouring as much as possible has been exhilarating. I have been plowing through books, articles, and reports, and I have loved every minute of it. I have indeed found my calling in life. (I already knew that. I had a dream a few weeks ago in which I observed myself gleefully telling a friend that my ideal career would involve reading books for 40 hours a week. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a clear statement from my unconscious). The challenge now is to keep convincing the wielder of my paycheck that they should keep funding my job. With an a bucketful of humility, an uncomfortable dose of courage, and an unearned blessing of luck, I just might succeed.
What is truly humbling about working in academia, however, is when that weight of ages of accumulated knowledge is made palpable. That is the topic of today’s story. Last week, I travelled to Uppsala in part to deal with some bureaucratic tasks, but mostly to celebrate one of the newest members of the Academy. My friend T’ew (we met in Korea; I’m sure there are pictures of him on this blog somewhere) recently became Dr. P. T. Serivichyaswat when he successfully defended his on “cellular mechanisms of plant tissue regeneration”. I told you I’m surrounded by geniuses. I understood about five minutes of his 30-minute presentation (the dumbed down bits for the general audience); the rest may as well have been given in Thai because at least 80% of the vocabulary was meaningless noise to my brain. But that’s not the relevant part of the introduction. The day before his defense, I had a free day to do some work, and in the evening, I ended up wandering Uppsala, a city with centuries of history that perhaps I’ll dig into one day. I visited the university library, Carolina Rediviva, and spent a couple hours in the main reading room. One hour was spent scribbling the following reflection into my journal.
I step gently, but my feet feel too clumsy for this place. Even m breathing feels too loud. I don’t know if I have ever truly experienced the feeling of “quiet as a library.” Between the occasional cough, shuffle of feet, flutter of pages, tick of computer keys, the only background noise is the faint hiss of a radiator. This is the sound of focus.
This room, despite the LED light bulbs, the green emergency exit signs, and of course the laptop computers on every desk, seems to be a sanctuary from the world of dings, beeps, honks, roars, growls, squeals, shouts, and all other types of demands for attention. It is a filter. Only those things that are conducive to focus may pass. That filter consists of merely one word “tyst” (quiet) in unobnoxious letters on the door. It is merely understood that those who enter will exercise the utmost restraint. It is the culture here. In this place, the rational mind reigns supreme. In here, one’s eyes cannot help but be lifted up to the stacks upon stacks of books that line the walls, three floors high. In here, there is plenty of room to think.
This room is also a portal. Above me stands Lukas von Breda in his royal robes; I have no idea who he was in real life, but his portrait sure is impressive. Beside him stands an oversized bust of a serious-looking man whose broached collar indicates he lived not centuries but millennia before I was even a shadow of a thought. And of course, above them stand the rows upon rows upon rows of books. The oldest I’ve found (so far) was printed in 1728. It sat inconspicuously on an out-of-the-way shelf, suggesting that such a publication date is nothing special in here. I suspect that most of these books have not shown their pages to curious eyes in years (decades? centuries?!)
Their value now is not their content, but the symbolic weight of their being. As a whole, they seem to say, “You down there, with your opinions and grievances; you with your technology; what do you truly know of the world? How much do you even know of your current world, much less about the world that was when we took our places upon these shelves? Remember that the world you know, the society that surrounds and protects you, rests on a foundation built of the knowledge of millennia. The wisdom required just to create the space where you now sit is utterly incomprehensible.”
If a voracious reader spent their entire life in just this room, maybe – just maybe – they could scan through its contents, assuming it does not grow in the coming decades, and assuming that our dear scholar is already fluent in eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century standards of Swedish, English, Danish, German, Chinese, and Russian (just a selection of the languages I’ve glimpsed while browsing). And still, they would have learned nothing compared to the combined intellectual weight of the knowledge it took to create all of these works.
One does not comprehend; one only feels. One’s hands feel the worn lacquer of the table top, the chipped paint of the reading lamp with its heavy steel switch. One smells the must of dry pages and the stagnant air of the empty desk drawer. One senses with something deeper than the physical sense doors that there exists something herein that commands respect. The windows, three stories tall, suggest that this room was built for someone much greater than us frail and weak apes who scuttle about on the expanse of floor. This place houses giants, and in here, we do not portend to such irreverence as standing on their shoulders. In here, we sit attentively in their shadows. Perhaps, we will, one day, pick up a small piece of what they have handed down to us, and carry it some small and insignificant distance to hand it yet again to another curious, attentive, and ignorant young mind, to whom we will be inexorably connected when they too flick on this rusty old reading lamp, take a breath of ages-old air, and gaze up at the rows upon rows of imperceptibly more decayed books with their ever so slightly more faded words containing perhaps just a few new pages added to their practically infinite knowledge. and hopefully, they too will feel the revery that I feel now…
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… or perhaps they’ll burn it all down out of spite and ignorance. That’s always a possibility.
The second hour of my time in the library was spent flipping through giant map books. The first detailed the rise and fall of the Swedish empire in the 17th and 18th centuries. The second was a collection of maps through the discovery of the Americas, including a reproduction of the map by Waldseemüller from 1507 that first used the name America for the New World.
Cast Off, Set Sail 