Even more troubling, though is the realism inherent in post-Modernist literature; in this, I mean the tedious reproduction of lived life naturalism, as opposed to the rich tradition of European Realism, which exaggerated human experience, celebrated a wide historical consciousness, and reconciled real conditions with desire. No reader, to whom what is actual is anathema, would quarrel with Osip Mandelstam's axiom that "The only thing that is real is the work itself;" when he concludes, though, that the artist "desires no other paradise than existence," Mandelstam reveals the divergence between readers and artists. Existence, which to the writer is a paradise, is to the reader a veritable hell. Without the writer's option to use existence, exploit and transmute its properties, the reader is left alone with what is a virtual insult, so diminished is it when compared with literature: the dour insignificance of life. This verdict the writer escapes; after all, he creates literature.

WHAT, THEN, should the reader do? Once the tradition has been read through, how should he store up emblems of that other, sublime world? What I propose is that he cultivate esoterica, those unknown, undiscovered volumes which, when we come upon them in libraries, have not been taken out since 1937. Arminius Vambery's Travels in Central Asia, published in 1865, or A.S. Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World, are such examples. These works could be considered autonomous, in that their survivance is related to no specific epoch or lineage. Their titles have been handed on to me through other authors: in the case of Vambery, Arthur Koestler, in The Invisible Writing, while Eddington is quoted in Walter Benjamin's Illuminations.

In just such random encounters consists the reader's true vocation. These works are capital invested in what Cesar Pavese called "this business of living." Obscure testaments to how eclectic our recorded knowledge has become, writers like Eddington and Vambery (I could name Leon Bloy, Jacques Riviere, and Paul Nizan as well) remind the reader that a multitude of others who possess little reputation have written in the same spirit as the reader reads: their interest was in the chronicling, the renovation of their own experience, and all of them wrote in the hope that such an operation would be valuable to their audience. In this instance, Eddington's treatise on "the downfall of classical physics" and the scientific revolution which quantum theory and the notion of relativity introduced has been superseded, is obsolete; it was written in 1927. Still, Brecht's Hauspostille appeared at the same time, and the critic's disposition is to consider this document beside the historical conditions which are in evidence now.

The reader, confronted with two such diverse texts, isn't interested in their differences. Rather, he discerns in them an impulse to decipher existence, to balance what is observable against what is real. This is the essence of the reader's activity: to establish relations between the dissonant elements of consciousness. And this is the reader's advantage as well; because the labor he has chosen is alienated and superfluous, because he inhabits a speculative realm, his life is devoted to those works which secure his own mind in the world, through the revelation of resemblances.

It follows, then, that science is valuable to the reader only as myth, as a metaphor which mirrors the relations drawn in literature between our own experience and its intelligible representation. That Sir Thomas Browne is now studied in universities as a specimen of English 17th century prose doesn't concern the reader, who turns to Pseudodoxia Epidemica in the same spirit that he turns to Wittgenstein or Levi-Strauss: to collect what could be called "taxonomies of natural phenomena." Nostalgia, the sad evocation of our universal angst, episodes which recall a decisive moment in our lives, ontological dread before the landscape we inhabit: these are all sensations which, like the reader's bookshelves, belong to some taxonomic order.

To cite an example, Eddington writes:

When we compare the universe as it is now supposed to be with the universe as we had ordinarily preconceived it, the most arresting change is not the rearrangement of space and time by Einstein but the dissolution of all that we regard as most solid into tiny specks floating in the void.

The reader, reputed to have a speculative, even impractical mind, and notorious as a bad scientist, seizes on such sentences and enters them in a notebook crammed with similar apercus. In this act, and in its cause (here, Eddington's observation), the reader's temperament is revealed, a temperament at once impatient and imbued with languor, undiscipfiined and ordered. It conspires to receive all ideas as echoes of other ideas, on a diachronic level. In other words, whenever the reader happens to notice an idea which resonates through time, associations clamor like heirs to be recognized, and a number of them receive admittance.

Eddington's quote recalls, through a single, coherent image, the entire enterprise in which Western philosophical discourse and literature have been involved since Descartes: the mapping of consciousness. And it is the reader who locates this inheritance, identifies the "tiny specks floating in a void" as truths, and jots them down. This could be interpreted. I suppose, as a variation on Benjamin's idea that a work should be written composed of quotations; except that no thought of "composing a work" ever occurs to the reader. Rather, quotations are the material out of which he constructs a mosaic depicting the world.

Esoteric works, Prague linguistics, the letters of Alban Berg, and forgotten masterpieces like Baudelaire's Pauvre Belgique are elevated to the level on indispensable texts; like letters discovered several decades after their author's death, which then prompt a revision of his life and work these documents compel the reader to reevaluate his library and his notebook, those two vessels of humane learning. In time, he realizes that what he has collected represents no more than a mere portion of what there is, and resolves to devote his labors to the subjective, to whatever mirrors and enhances his own suspicions about the nature of existence.

MY LIBRARY, then, exhibits a rather unusual number of books by Delmore Schwartz and Issac Rosenfeld, two writers who possess reputations even though their works are not read. Schwartz's unprocurable volumes are lined up on the shelves, all seven of them borrowed from Widener Library and long over-due. Except for Summer Knowledge, the poems, these are first editions, none of which have ever been reissued. The stories, the verse play Shenandoah, the prose poems and sonnets in Vaudeville for a Princess (a copy of which I passed up in a Washington D.C. antiquarian dealder's shop because it was too expensive), the recent Selected Essays, and Genesis that undiscovered long poem (two hundred pages in all), rival to Notebook, Patterson, and Homage to Mistress Bradstreet; as I studied them, it occured to me that Schwartz is not read, that these limited editions and out-of-print books have passed through the hands of less than two thousand readers.

In Rosenfeld's case, it is important to own the complete oeuvre, since it comprises no more than three texts, none of which are ever available. Because he didn't live long enough to write or publish all that he could have, these volumes reside on the shelves like orphans; and I act as their self-appointed guardian. What justifies such a posture? The conviction that Rosenfeld's novel, Passage From Home, identifies taxonomies of natural phenomena which coincide with mine: Chicago, the lives of the Jewish urban intelligentsia, family sorrow; that in the journalistic, feuilleton-like reflections of literature collected in The Age of Enormity, a musuem of modern life has been opened where the meditations of a typical educated reader in our time await inspection; and that the stories. Alpha and Omega, reverberate with an awareness of that event which Benjamin defected in Leskov: "experience has fallen in value." It has become harder and harder to comprehend what happens to us, to claim significance; the leisured cultivation of consciousness is a condition of the past.

So that Rosenfeld's allegories and parables. Delmore Schwartz's obsessive researches on the traumatic, familial and repressive motifs of childhood, the disastrous emotional episodes which combine with social conditions to shape our character-formation: these appear to me no less conclusive than the version of the universe's origin quoted somwhere in Scholem; "When God created His world, He first created the Book of Creation and looked into it and from it created His world."

The reader's library is this Book, his experience inside if the world.