In praise of library chaos
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The books we write and the books we read are similar to our children. We do not prefer this over that (AFP)
Books at night cause insomnia if they are not opened and read
Personal family libraries resemble the images of their owners, in form, organization, arrangement, chaos, and content.
The library is the pharmacy for the whole house, and the house inhabited by a library is filled with happiness, the great happiness whose secret only those who have tasted the pleasures of thought and the joy of creativity can understand.
For almost half a century, I have been collecting books, day after day, trip after trip, book upon book, book after book. Whenever I travel to a country, I am promised a bag of books before anything else, and this crazy desire is still recurring and this fire is burning violently.
The book is the writer's skin and the reader's shelter.
The books we write and the books we read are similar to our children. We do not prefer this over the other.
A house that does not have a library cannot be entered by angels, gods, or demons? It is a house without a door, without light, without an address, an empty space.
The chaos of a full, living library is like the chaos of a lovers' bed in the morning!
The more carefully organized and arranged a personal library is, the more it is an ornament rather than a maze of reading, creativity, and accountability.
The reader in a living, chaotic library is like a cat. He moves in a non-straight line, turning and turning one thing over another, and he does not miss the intended title or the desired goal.
The most enjoyable moments of loss are those we feel while we are lost in our personal library.
Whenever I watch on television a conversation with a writer or thinker while he is at home, and behind him appears a harshly arranged library, with volumes and chains of volumes, I feel that this person is not practicing crazy love with his library, and this library, in its harsh arrangement of books, seems to me like a cemetery with tightly organized graves, where The dead sleep eternally without moving, with no one turning them onto their backs
Homes with libraries are filled with a magical fragrant scent stolen from the bouquet of heaven’s scents, and the smell of paper written in ink is the most exquisite, most precious, and finest perfume ever.
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The family or personal library is a picture of the path of the person who collected it, title by title, and no one understands the secret of the chaos of this library except its owner. Or their south. Books are not dead. They need to be moved, turned, securitized, opened and closed, marginalized, and excavated. The arrangement of the personal library is not the same as the arrangement of the tombs of kings and aristocratic families.
Whenever your personal library is floating in its poetic chaos, know that it has life flowing through the joints of its shelves and that there is a watchful hand over it so that it does not sleep or fall asleep. Books never sleep, and that behind this creative chaos is a mind that is debating and a person who is an avid reader and is digging into its treasures without stopping.
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Books do not sleep on shelves, and shelves are not beds with soft mattresses. Books stare at us, screaming at us and at us if we ignore them.
Books grieve as humans grieve when they feel that no one is massaging their joints and breaking down the outlines of their words.
Books speak with great eloquence, they speak to the ear that is good at listening to their sounds and understanding the secrets of their language. The sounds of books are different, and no sound is similar to another. Some books have soft sounds, some are harsh, some are sharp, some are loud, and some are low.
Books, like people, also suffer from colds, rheumatism, and itching if we ignore their health, which is in discussing and reading them.
When I was general director of the Algerian National Library, I would sometimes go up to the seventh floor at night, where the largest bookstores were located, and walk between the long, high, full shelves that extend for hundreds of metres. I would walk under dim lights coming down from the edges. I would listen to the place and hear real, clear voices. Yes. Real and confirmed voices, the voices of the authors of the books that sit on the shelves, I hear her chanting in my ears, I recognize her completely. This is the voice of Al-Ma’arri, that is the voice of Al-Mutanabbi, and that coming from the other shelf is the voice of Abu Hayyan Al-Tawhidi, and not far from it emanates the voice of Ibn Hazm, Ibn Zaydun, Muhammad Deeb, Naguib Mahfouz, Al-Maghut, Asiya Jabbar, Shakespeare, Molière, Ahmed Shawqi, Nazik Al-Malaika, Baudelaire, Saeed Aql, and Zola. And Ahmed Shawky, Victor Hugo, Mouloud Mammeri, Saadallah Wannous, Mohamed Arkoun, and Tayeb Tizini... a choir in harmony and harmony. It reminds us of its eternal existence, of its victory over death, voices coming from hundreds of years ago, from different geographies. Every time it penetrates into the depth of the warehouse with steps between the shelves, the voices multiply. They are many in different languages and accents, they are voices between a call and a prayer, as if each voice is searching for a reader or a night companion for its book, wanting every day to come off the shelves. To sit in the hands and under the watchful eyes of the reader.
Books at night cause insomnia if they are not opened and read. The insomnia of books is more painful than the insomnia of a person.
They are the voices of writers who suffered as they wrote page after page, writers who were imprisoned for an opinion they proved in a book, writers who were assassinated for a philosophical position or religious or political effort, writers who loved to death and became martyrs of love, writers who betrayed and others who lived in exile for years and were not exonerated from their love for their countries...
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Books are living creatures, some of them were subjected to execution, some were burned, and some were stoned, just like their authors.
Whenever I stare at the chaos of my library, I repeat what the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges said, “I always imagine heaven in the form of a library,” and how generous this heaven is when it is in complete chaos, chaos that creates surprise at every moment and at every touch.



Amin Zaoui is a writer and thinker