"The world is a book" (Augustine? Lamartine?)

[Stephen Goranson]

I don't know who's first, but "On the Cult of Books" by Jorge Luis Borges (in
Other Inquisitions, 1964, tr. Ruth Simms, 116-20) is related and good, so I'll
mention that it starts: "In Book VII of the Odyssey we read that the
gods weave
misfortunes into the pattern of events to make a song for future
generations to
sing. Mallarme's statement that the world exists in order to be written into a
book seems to repeat, some thirty centuries later, the same concept of an
aesthetic justification for evils." And ends, after checking in with
Clement of
Alexandria, Augustine, The Mother of the Book, Sepher Yetzirah, and others:
"According to Mallarme, the world exists for a book: according to Bloy, we are
versicles or words or letters of a magic book, and that incessant book is the
only thing in the world: or, rather. it is the world."

Stephen Goranson
http://www.duke.edu/~goranson

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