Sublime

“Nothing pretextual is holy.

On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of the obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth-century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German monk toward the end of the fourteenth century.

He was, in other words, the library’s memory and the soul of the scriptorium.

No one, even if he wished, would succeed. The library defends itself, immeasurable as the truth it houses, deceitful as the falsehood it preserves. A spiritual labyrinth, it is also a terrestrial labyrinth. You might enter and you might not emerge. And having said this, I would like you to conform to the rules of the abbey.”

and

As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.