Build a to withstand the tsunami of time

◎ Qu Rui

In the prologue to The Secret History of Books, the author, Elaine Vallejo, takes us back to ancient Greek times: a group of men wade through the mountains and rivers on desolate roads, painstakingly, on a secret mission to find all the books in the world (the scarce treasures of the time) for the king of Egypt to fill the world's first library.

The library is named after Alexander of Macedon, who fought in the south and the north and carried a copy of the Iliad with him all year round. We can understand that it is precisely because of the influence of Achilles in the book that Alexander came up with the heroic dream of building a heroic career and establishing a vast empire across The Continent of Europe, Asia and Africa. However, the glory of the war was very short-lived, and with Alexander's sudden death, the empire he had built also fell apart.

History played a joke that made the Macedonian Ptolemy the king of Egypt, a foreign ruler who did not understand Egyptian customs and understood the Egyptian language, so he moved the capital to an enclave, the Mediterranean island of Faroe, and established alexandria, a city that marked the dawn of human civilization. Over the next two hundred years, King Ptolemaic (and his successors) built the Library of Alexandria and ordered the collection of all the books in the world, intending to make this small island across Europe, Asia and Africa a beacon of human civilization, a home for philosophers and wise men, and a haven for all foreign cultures, which is probably the oldest cosmopolitan dream in human history, from a king who had been exiled to a foreign land for generations because of his power.

Today we probably don't think that for the ancient Greeks, the Library of Alexandria was a temple presided over by priests, and people at that time entered the world of books almost with a pilgrimage. Before the birth of the world's three major religions, civilization itself played a religious role. In this regard, Elaine Vallejo wrote: "It is touching to think of the ancient Greeks who dreamed of knocking on the door of heaven with a scroll in their hands. ”

The Secret History of Books does not explore the history of the technological evolution of books as "objects", but tells the history of the birth of books, and in the ancient Greek and Roman eras more than two thousand years ago, human civilization symbolized by books was born. It grows out of the barbaric strip and takes root. Elaine Vallejo's scattered narrative leads the reader through fragments of distant history. In a way, fragments are more authentic, because real history is not like a river of time flowing from the past to the future, as we think. It is more like a nebula radiating in all directions after the Big Bang.

As the beginning of Western civilization, ancient Greek and Roman civilizations still secretly influence modern people's views of the world: although Socrates opposed writing, his wise words still echo in today's world; the blind poet Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey" have been traced back to the source of literature and are still read by countless people; the philosopher Herakrit's reflections on time are still valid today; the female poet Sappho left only a few fragments, but the emotions expressed in those verses still resonate with readers And Herodotus, the father of history, was the first to travel the world, and the way he looked at the world from the perspective of his own people still inspired the contemporary world full of populism.

Thanks to books, we can hear the echoes of these ancient voices. However, Elaine Vallejo reminds us that it is not easy to preserve these voices – generations have made unimaginable efforts to do so. Just as human beings themselves have experienced a long period of evolution to create the flame of civilization, the birth of books has also been accompanied by a long evolutionary history: the transformation from spoken to written writing, the creation of the alphabet, the continuous innovation of writing materials, the invention of printing... It is the common result of countless wonderful contingencies, the aspirations of countless individuals, and the wisdom of countless human beings. The reason why human beings need books is to preserve the voice of civilization and correct the barbarism of human beings. These ancient sounds are not obsolete because they are far away, because human civilization has not co-evolved with the rapid development of technology, and under the thin coating of civilization, it is still filled with barbaric soil. And the history of the birth of books has always been the history of civilization and barbarism.

The earliest epics in the West were homer who described the Trojan War, and the earliest surviving plays were the Persians (Aeschylus took the enemy's side and reflected on the damage that war did to people) – all this is not accidental, and human wars have never stopped. Elaine Vallejo also describes one of these times in the Book of Secret History: the ancient Romans built their homes by seizing land, multiplied by robbing women, became rich by buying and selling slaves, and finally, launched barbaric wars to replace civilized ancient Greece—stories that are not far away from us, because they have been playing out for the next two thousand years.

Every war destroys countless important things, and when peace comes, people begin to rebuild a new "civilization." Sometimes, the first consideration is national "self-esteem". Elaine Vallejo details the process of how a new civilization replaced the old. Books were burned—or when the booty of war was plundered by private individuals; civilized people who were good at writing were reduced to slaves to barbarians; former libraries were abandoned and transformed into new forms: "The Romans built the Twin Libraries, like the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, to emphasize the homology of ancient Greek and Roman literature." Just as all "contemporary people" seek to justify the "civilization" they have created, and push the civilization of a bygone era to an unimportant position— and that is why we need to look for answers from the distant past, from the forgotten civilization.

Irine Vallejo's writings are full of irony, and she patiently observes contradictory human behavior: people worship violence, people do harm, people secretly learn, people aspire to become civilized and noble—and hide that side of barbaric violence. The evolution of human civilization has followed this pattern, and in every age civilization and barbarism have competed with each other, and every book has played an important role in it, what kind of books people forbid, what kind of books people are guarding— like countless miniature wars of civilizations. Everyone in history is still able to make their choices. Sometimes, guarding a book is guarding the ideal world form.

Perhaps only a man who has been saved by books can write such a work, and in the epilogue, Elaine Vallejo writes that she wrote the book in the darkness of her personal circumstances. Perhaps it is this darkness that constitutes the dazzling energy of the book, and Elaine Vallejo, with a passion for books, is informative and sensual. Therefore, those distant knowledge is not cold, but transformed into living emotions, responding to the questions in people's hearts.

For example, when she sees a scroll depicting ancient Greeks reading, she recalls her childhood attachment to listening to stories: "I put my teeth on the palm of my hand and watched: childhood is shattering, leaving a few holes in the body, throwing some white fragments along the way, and the days of listening to stories will soon be over." For two thousand years, no matter how the world changed, the happiness that people felt when reading was similar.

As a writer, for example, she knows better than anyone the difficulties of writing and what it means to write a book: "It's like feeling the earth cracking under your feet." At the end of the day, writing is no different from what we start doing before we learn it, like foreign languages, driving, being a mom, and being alive. For two thousand years, no matter how technological tools evolved, the feelings people had about delivering life as they wrote were the same.

For example, out of female experience, Elaine Vallejo bravely criticizes the blindness and prejudice of civilization: the shackles and prejudices of women's creativity in a civilization built by patriarchy. In ancient Greco-Roman times, the works of female writers could only be accidentally preserved in later generations if they were mixed with the works of male writers. Today's women, on the other hand, are able to read and write – but they still suffer from traditional prejudices and neglect.

In these passages, we feel the anger, pain, and love that comes from the heart. In the era when there was no printing, people were fortunate to pass it on to future generations by constantly copying a book and carefully preserving it, while destroying a book only required a match. It's like a metaphor for human civilization as a whole: it's so hard to create, so easy to destroy. It is this eternal inequality that makes people feel eternally "the darkness of circumstances," and only those who have experienced this grayness can understand each other in the soul. Just as only those who have experienced the comfort of books will become the guardians of books.

The process of reading this book is equally memorable, and perhaps it can be described in the words written by Elaine Vallejo: "Owning a book is equivalent to taking a balancing step on a tightrope; equivalent to trying to pick up the scattered fragments of the universe and piece it together into meaningful images; equivalent to building harmonious buildings in the face of chaos; equivalent to gathering sand into a tower; equivalent to finding a place to guard everything we fear forgetting; equivalent to having the memory of the world; equivalent to building a dike against the tsunami of time." ”