Judging by the journalist’s expression, emotions were ruling everything at that time. By November, we had gotten over it. Try to imagine (back in October) the President’s bare knees.
– I advise reading Hrabal. – Jerzy Owsiak convinced us many years ago. However, he never donated Hrabal’s books to our Library 5inLodz.pl. Perhaps it was because of the bare knees…
Back in the day, you didn’t just buy books, you had to find them.
– You stood in lines, searched in bazaars – Jurek Owsiak used to say. – Your idea is great, these books carry the whole charge of time. They will gain the status of an exhibit.
And that’s it.
The Library 5inLodz.pl is growing, books are gaining the status of an exhibit with age.
We don’t have Hrabal, nor others.
We have (and read) Eliade’s Diaries. And there are parts that fit our situation perfectly.
“I dreamed I was descending… to a well-known boat… it seemed foreign… attached to its side was another boat, which I didn’t notice at first and couldn’t figure out its shape or size. Almost unconsciously, I moved from my boat to this other, mysterious one. And suddenly I understand. Everything becomes wonderfully clear and simple. Everything: life, death, the meaning of existence… Walking on… this boat, I kept thinking: unbelievable, that no one has thought of this before, it’s so obvious.”
And usually, at this point, one wakes up, when it turns out that no one considers it “so obvious”.
This “lack of dimensions and shape” is almost a direct reference to our city of Łódź! Anyway, it’s comforting that at least some dreams of the deceased Romanians about the Ganges are not much different from the matter in which we have been digging for several years now. And it’s quite likely that Eliade, placing this in a dream, is right: it’s dream material, poorly subject to shaping by administration and law.
A city cannot be closed like a book is closed after reading, without noting when and what we dream.
Although, in the end, it might be better to write something instead of talking. How much can one talk about the city?
Unless it’s about charisma. Of course, the charisma of the book, the efforts to restore the book (as a physical object) to the status of a fetish, an object as desirable as the latest model of a tablet.
Charisma, along with empathy, are phenomena being pushed out of our lives (and no one really wants this, hence actions – like Jerzy Owsiak’s Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity – that can clearly name it, enjoy general sympathy). The library should be a place to build charisma. Anyway, it won’t be a breakthrough moment, or a coming-out for the Library: not the audience, not the place, not the reach. We realize this. Talking about soft humanistic things like charisma, empathy, it’s worth balancing it with something that just works, works like a device. Even an app allowing to search for titles, names in the content of collected books is something.
Once, Gazeta Wyborcza published an article praising to the skies a niche quarterly published by one man – Lewis Lapham – Lapham’s Quarterly (Ron Rosenbaum, „Charge of the Lone Librarian”, Gazeta Wyborcza, January 17, 2013, pp. 22-23, with a moving lead: “Let’s not trade three thousand years of civilization for internet junk”). More or less the same can be written about Wartburg. For that, you don’t need a large scale, pretension, or heaven forbid (like Owsiak from) politicians’ attention.
5inLodz won’t increase the reading level in Poland like… a pandemic. An obvious consequence of the pandemic was an increase in sales of Albert Camus’s The Plague, just as the obvious success will be the book Bare Knees of the President. Actually, why obvious? Only because of the title?
