The Library as Macrocosm and Microcosm
The closing lecture at the Bibliothèque de France in Paris to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary

On 23 October 1994, I decided to visit the much-vaunted site in Bercy where the new national library of France was going to be built. Much earlier, when I was in my twenties, I had gone to read in the old library, the one on the Rue Richelieu, to research for the Dictionary of Imaginary Places that I was writing with my friend, Gianni Guadalupi. And because that was the first national library of France I knew, for me, that noble building and its stately Salle Labrouste were (perhaps in my mind still are) an indelible monument in my private French geography. First loves are often the ones that remain steadfast and are blind to factual reason.

National libraries, whether almost mythical ones such as that of Alexandria, or almost too down-to-earth ones such as the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, are above all symbolic buildings. They incarnate the identity of their readers, be they ambitious kings or resilient victims, reflecting back to them what these men and women, as readers, have understood to be their cultural and political memory, their language and their literature, the evidence of their existence and the inspiration of their mythologies. Ordinary libraries, whether private or public, are worlds defined by their chosen contents and their selective use. A national library, however, is the vaster universe that echoes and preserves them. A private library is an autobiography told in the voice of its reader, but a national library is the collective answer to the curse of Babel, alchemically transforming the linguistic chaos with which God intended to punish human ambition into a generous and intelligent ordering of things. Also, and this of the essence, into an instrument for dialogue and understanding.

On that day in Bercy three decades ago, walking along the edge of the great gaping hole from which the new BnF would rise, I picked up a small piece of wood dropped by one of the workers, wrote the date on it and kept it on my desk, because I superstitiously believe that colossal things such as the new BnF, things that are perhaps too big to be seen properly, require a metaphor or an emblem that you can hold in your hand to come to terms with their grandeur: a microcosm, as it were, that implies in its smallness the macrocosm that contains it.



The Greek Stoics, and later the Talmudic commentators, considered the universe to be a living creature made up of a body and a soul. Consequently, if the universe is an exaggerated version of a human being, then a human being is a reduced version of the ineffable universe. The Stoics and the Talmudists believed that the human soul, as part of the universal soul, is to the human body what the universal soul is to the universe, and that the rational part of that soul works within each of us just like the universal intellect works in the whole of the universe. Most importantly, they also believed that the macrocosm influences the microcosm, and vice versa. If the whole universe is one organic body possessing life, motion and a soul, then the library could be considered the repository of both souls – the universal and the human one. That is what Borges meant when he suggested that the terms universe and library are synonymous.

Libraries are places in which the imagination can feel at home. The library of the Rue Richelieu seemed to me a perfect place to read about Fourier’s Phalanstère and Campanella’s Città del Sole, Casanova’s Protocosmo and Rabelais’s Mer de mots gelés. As a reader, I believe that the frame of a text is all-important, because it colours and defines, limits and expands, the words that flow across the page or screen. The Salle Labrouste, occupied today by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), contrary to what its external appearance might suggest, is the realisation of that classic impossibility: the squaring of a circle. The Salle Labrouste is a square crowned by nine domes, supported by metal columns in the form of tree trunks. And the repetition of the arches suggests, at least it did to me, that reading is a circular activity, beginning on a page hidden in some volume that I would never open on a shelf that I would never reach, and ending (but there is no end to reading) on another page equally hidden and remote.

Squaring the circle was a problem proposed by Anaxagoras in the fifth century B.C.; in the late nineteenth century, the mathematician Ferdinand von Lindemann definitively proved this to be an impossible task. And yet, the fascination with accomplishing that which is proven impossible stubbornly persists in the human imagination: we are always seeking ways of coining the face of the wind and making a rope of sand. Since the beginning of time, we have believed that one day we will be able to determine the true nature of the unicorn, what song the sirens sang, and the best system of government to render a society a little more just and a little less unhappy. Libraries, in their almost infinite capacity, tempt us with the expectation of finding these solutions in one of their shrouded volumes. The Salle Labrouste was, and perhaps still is, in spite of the proof to the contrary, a successful and fruitful squaring of the circle.

The present BnF too is a squared circle, the square being in this case the book-shaped towers of glass now lined with wood, sitting on its vast mastaba, and the circle the all-encompassing realm of human knowledge contained within its bowels. Like the wishful collection in the Mouseion of the Ptolemian kings, the BnF is a macrocosm that has everything, or close to everything – but it is at the same time a microsom of our experience. One example: in December 1996, the BnF opened an exhibition called ‘Tous les savoirs du monde’ to celebrate the inauguration of the new site. The show traced six millennia of encyclopedias, displaying numerous examples of our passion for classifying our knowledge and for making lists, from fragments of the earliest repertoires inscribed in cuneiform script on Sumerian clay tablets, to one of the 10,040 chapters of the Grande encyclopédie impériale illustrée des temps passé et présent of Chen Menglei, of 1726, an oriental contemporary of the better-known Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers of Diderot and D’Alembert – all presented to the curious public in the BnF’s brand-new display cases. Perhaps the notion of an encyclopedia belongs to the collective imagination. In the nineteen-sixties, the mathematician Roger Penrose suddenly came to the realisation that every particle, every force, every light cone, every cause, effect, law and property, might be, in its most fundamental form, a pure, glorious, complex geometry, forming a new and stunning picture of reality. A library such as the new BnF can be understood to be the universal representation of such comprehensive geometry.

In the thirty years since my first encounter with the ambitious foundations of the BnF, much has changed in the world of libraries. The census of 2023 showed that the BnF held over 16 million printed books, more than 400,000 periodicals, close to 400,000 manuscripts, and over 16 million images. To these were added over 54,000 million web archives. Today, of course, these figures have increased. This impressive number, fruit of our electronic age, carries with it a new danger. The Library of Alexandria was threatened by fire, water, looters, bookworms and other noxious creatures. The BnF, whose holdings are in their vast majority virtual, is today threatened not only by cyberpirates, like the ones who attacked the British Library in October 2023, whose electronic holdings have not yet been fully restored, but also by the possibility of rendering intellectual research and creativity obsolete. The electronic technology has enriched us, but also rendered us more vulnerable. The making of the waters on the Second Day of Creation carried within it the threat of the future Universal Deluge. The making of the so-called Artificial Intelligence carries within it the temptation of relinquishing our humanity to statistical machines.

In a text composed in its original Semitic version in the first century and later included in the Apocrypha, known as the Life of Adam and Eve, Eve asks her son Seth to write her story and that of his father Adam. At the end of the book, in a meta-literary flourish, Eve says to him: ‘Listen to me, my child! Make tablets of stone and others of clay, and write on them all my life and your father’s and all that you have heard and seen from us. If the Lord judge our race by water, the tables of clay will be dissolved and the tables of stone will remain; but if by fire, the tables of stone will be broken up and the tables of clay will be baked hard’. Every text depends for its survival and its reading, as we have noted, on its framework, but also on the qualities of its support, be it clay or stone, paper or screen. No text is ever exclusively analogue or virtual, independent of its material context: every text is defined by both its words and by the space in which those words exist. No doubt the BnF is conscious of this, and in these days when intellect and creativity, memory and reason, are once again threatened, it may be useful to remind ourselves of the fragility of our libraries of clay and paper and virtual texts.

I said that a national library symbolically incarnates the identity of its readers. This means not only who these readers believe themselves to be, but also what they choose to forget of their past experience. Because, as the director of the Bodleian Library, Richard Ovenden, has said, a library is a place of evidence: it shows not only our documented reality, but also what we choose not to remember, what we would rather forget or ignore. All libraries exist under the shadow of censorship, whether from deliberate exclusion or from necessity, whether from a government’s fears or from physical lack of space and funds. And yet, even when censored, a national library serves as a reminder of what we may generously aspire to in the best of all possible worlds, or what we may regret losing.

Since the beginning of time, we have known that, as individuals of a species, we cannot survive alone. However, also as individual of the species, we are constantly tempted to relinquish that which brings us together and helps us endure the threats that surround us. We are all of us granted the possibility of possessing faith, hope and charity – above all caritas, without which all other powers are nothing. As is proven again and again, and in spite of the loud proclamations of bloodthirsty tyrants and la droite decomplexée, selfishness is not a virtue, and if a person chooses to benefit himself alone at the expense of all others, that person is condemning himself to suicide. A library holds on its shelves both options, the first under the label of the ecumenical discovery of Rimbaud, that Je est un autre; the second under the stupefying cry of fascist Spain, Viva la muerte.

In his 2009 book The Master and His Emissary, the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist argued that the two hemispheres of the human brain can be seen as respectively logical and creative, the left hemisphere being detail-oriented, the right being whole-oriented. These two modes of perception are not exclusive, they simply prioritize one capacity over the other. The right hemisphere oversees our surroundings, the general view, looking out for the consequences of our actions. The left hemisphere concentrates on picking out a single prey, the object of our intentions. Left to its own devices, a society privileging the left hemisphere will tend to forgo empathy, neglect the environment, become blind to the results of egotistical actions centred in the present moment. A Talmudist might see the left hemisphere as the microcosm, and the right hemisphere as the macrocosm: the conflictive relationships of both parings, the biological and the mystical, are similar. Our histories seem to indicate that, since the time of the Industrial Revolution at least, the left hemisphere has come to dominate our societies, and that we have closed ourselves in our single shells from our fellow human beings and the world at large. Our libraries, however, continue to insist that both hemispheres are of the essence. Whether we pay attention to the evidence is another matter.

In ancient Sumeria, events in earthly politics and religion were seen as parallels of heavenly ones: events on earth are reflected, and have to be explained, by events in heaven. The conduct of a king, for instance, was mirrored in the conduct of heavenly bodies, and the secret ways of the gods were revealed in the entrails of a sacrificial animal. In one of the oldest epics that has come down to us, it is told that the people of the City of Uruk lived under the despotic rule of a cruel young king called Gilgamesh whose laws were unjust and whose pleasure lay in their pain. King Gilgamesh cast aside intellectual pursuits. He enjoyed wrestling and making other men wrestle with him, ‘even when they had better things to do’, and he liked to have his way with young women, and also with brides-to-be. The people of Uruk were understandably unhappy and prayed to the gods to find a way to make things better. They did not pray for the death of Gilamesh, because they knew that a society must find ways to heal itself without resorting to murder. To remedy the situation, the gods sent a wild man, Enkidu, to wrestle with the king, and in the bodily struggle between corrupt civilisation and innocent nature both men emerged as better people. Throughout our histories, under other names, Gilgamesh must learn to be a better ruler and Enkidu must acquire the civilised laws of society, over and over again. Human societies must be based on certain common rules, as well as laws of justice and caritas, and we have to keep repeating them in order not to lose our bearings in the path of what we like to think of as progress. ‘Clearly,’ wrote G. K. Chesterton, ‘there could be no safety for a society in which the remark by the Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original and dazzling epigram.’ In order for society to protect itself from itself, these truisms need to be posted above every door and displayed on every mantlepiece.

There never seems to be a definitive conclusion to our trials and errors. The human microcosm returns again and again to a state of wilful injustice and selfish ambition, concentrating on what one individual wants for himself alone, and again and again the macrocosm must mirror back the consequences of these actions in an attempt to restore the balance, especially now, in this world that seems to have grown suddenly so murky. But as Juan Gabriel Vásquez has so wisely said, ‘we are very bad judges of the present moment, perhaps because the present does not really exist: everything is memory, and this sentence that I have just written is already a memory’. In the case of Gilgamesh, this occurs with the death of his beloved Enkidu, the incarnation of Nature; in our case, with warnings of the foreseeable extinction of human life on earth. Gilgamesh’s subjects prayed to the gods for salvation; perhaps for us, more effective than prayers, are small, persistent and stubborn acts of resistance.

Small acts of resistance that don’t allow willed catastrophes to happen in silence, small refusals to acquiesce on unjust occasions, small withdrawals of collaboration in deeds of wilful destruction: these are some of the strategies that might perhaps allow for our survival. In Jewish tradition, human salvation depends on thirty-six just men known as the Lamed-vovniks, good men who are not aware of the existence of one another, and on whom rests the fate of the world. Islam increases this figure by four. Caliph Uthman ibn Affan, companion of the Prophet, heard his father say that the number of the just are forty. ‘Forty men?’ asked Caliph Uthman. ‘Don’t say men’, his father answered. ‘Rather say humans, because there are women among them.’ The least visible of us can be one of the Lamed-vovniks, but to recognize him or her we need caritas, the power of empathy.

The literature that we have collected over the ages on the shelves of our libraries, in its rich and endless ambiguity, can teach us empathy with Shylock but also with Macbeth, pity for Priam but also for Achilles, love for Antigone but also for Hecuba, sympathy for Madame Bovary but also for her more discreet husband. It can show us that, as is told in the Odyssey, every life is a voyage, and, as is told in the Iliad, every life is a battle, and that we are all exiles and toilers. It allows us, like Bartleby, to refuse to become the accomplice of senseless bureaucracy and unjust systems, and gives us permission to say out loud ‘I would prefer not to’. Unfortunately, today’s rhetoric is the contrary of literature. It has no ambiguity, no open questions to incite dialogue. It propounds the contrary of caritas: the unimportance of the other, or worse, the other’s inexistence. It echoes Rome’s Cartago delenda est. It commits genocide, it razes cultures considered alien, it imprisons artists and writers, and burns books.

As any reader must know, this state of affairs is not unique to our time. In 213 B.C., the Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang condemned to the flames the works of Confucius and had 460 Confucian scholars burnt alive. In 1258, the Mongol Prince Hulegu Khan set fire to the Library or House of Wisdom during the siege of Baghdad. In 1562, the Catholic bishop Diego de Landa ordered the destruction of the Maya codices of Yucatán. In nineteenth-century New York, Anthony Comstock, founder in 1873 of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, destroyed some fifteen tons of books he considered objectionable. In 1933, the Nazis assembled truckloads of so called ‘un-German’ books and threw them into the bonfire at Bebelplatz in Berlin. In our century, too, there is no dearth of examples.

In February 2025, Israeli police raided the Educational Bookshop in East Jerusalem, a place of dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, frequented by foreign diplomats, visiting writers and everyday readers. Two booksellers, Mahmood Muna and Ahmed Muna, were detained on house arrest and forbidden to return to their librarie for fifteen days. The French language has happily made librarie and bibliothèque synonymous. As you know, the Bnf was born as the Librarie du Roi, set up in 1368 in the Louvre Palace by Charles V and consisting of 917 manuscripts catalogued by the first royal librarian, Gilles Maillard. Whether librarie or bibliothèque, the assault on a site that holds books is a crime against humanity, and can be added to the vast and sorry list of violence against the word.

However, these acts do not happen in the shadows. There are always witnesses to these acts, and eventually recording angels will appear to attest to these infamies. A voice that makes itself heard, a private legal denunciation, a grassroots protest set up to oppose the crime, a courageous solitary sign held up silently – all of these show that the microcosm too can influence the workings of the overwhelming macrocosm.



As in the case of the Lamed-vovniks, we may never know the name, religion or nationality of this one woman demonstrating at the site of the raided bookstore in Jerusalem, but the image of her presence is enough to show that resistance, however minuscule, is always an option when facing injustice. This image of the protester is of crucial importance, and it should be displayed here, at the BnF, in this universe that contains ‘tous les savoirs du monde’, for all readers to see it and to find in it hope.

Because, superstitiously, I believe that small things, such as a single person standing up against tyranny, can become a symbol, a metaphor, an emblem raised high against that vast wave of destruction falling over the world once again today. We must remember that the left hemisphere of our brain can make us concentrate, not only on selfishly procuring our prey, but also on identifying flaws in the societal model that our selfishness has created. And in doing so, it can help the macrocosm, infected as it is by never-ending greed and blind violence, to heal itself once more and to provide a healthier frame for our life on earth. Like an illuminating word in a book waiting patiently to be opened by its intended reader, this image unerringly shows us the power of the imaginative microcosm mirroring the imagined wished-for macrocosm wherein it is contained.