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For eight (or sometimes even twelve) hours during (often) five days of the week-excluding the days I teach, but including weekends-I inhabit a narrow, windowless space, a "carrel" at Green Library. By no means am I complaining about the lack of a window, or a lack of space-on the contrary, to quote a close faculty friend of mine, my library carrel seems to fit me "like a glove." It certainly fits my not-so-slim body-but, above all (and if one can say so), it "fits my mind." The windowless walls, covered with bookshelves, throw every glance towards the outside world back to me, filled with books. And while I am writing-or thinking-it matters to me to know that, even outside the door of my carrel, I am surrounded by an almost endless labyrinth of bookshelves-which I experience as a spatialization of knowledge. Indeed, I am not much of an inhabitant of the electronic age-and I much appreciate the fact that the Stanford Libraries, while being probably one of the most electronically advanced libraries in the world, continue to offer me the comfort of a space, a cave, some would even say a "cathedral" of knowledge.
Of course I am not a professional specialist in things having to do with the library, nor do I even belong to those faculty who talk a lot about libraries. But it has crossed my mind that, in terms of its collections, Stanford Libraries are every bit as excellent and as (almost) complete as a 115-year-old library could be. Few books that I have ever searched for, published since 1890, are not on the shelves-and whenever that does happen, the curators go out of their way to provide me with the book needed quickly.
But what is even more glorious is the fact that, for several of my own books, now, the curators of the Stanford Libraries have brought me materials that got my thinking "derailed" in the most unexpected and productive ways. There is no doubt that the curators play an important role in my intellectual oikos. They can certainly be seen as the high priests of the cathedral of knowledge-but I like to think of them as those who provide continuity, who give our knowledge a future, and who, in providing that continuity and a future horizon, provide a great motivation for the work of those who, like me, do most of their writing in the library.
I think my family would agree that there is no other place where I feel more at home than at Green Library. Is this a pathology? It is certainly not necessary to spend so much time at the library in order to be productive. But, day after day, week after week, and month after month, I choose to spend my time there because no other place provides me with such a feeling of security and continuity in my work. And against the background of this continuity and security, I can begin to engage in the precarious process of what I like to call "thinking with risk."
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor in Literature at Stanford University, teaching in the departments of Comparative Literature, of French and Italian, and (by affiliation) of German Studies, Modern Thought and Literature, and Spanish & Portuguese. He is also Professeur Associé in the Département de Littérature Comparée at the Université de Montréal, Directeur d'études associé at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and Professeur attaché au Collège de France. Gumbrecht's main areas of teaching and research are the histories of French, Spanish, and Italian literatures (especially the Middle Ages, the eighteenth century, and the first half of the twentieth century); the history of literary criticism and of the humanities; and the history of Western thought since its classical origins. His more than nine hundred publications (translated into nineteen languages) include a history of Spanish literature, a chronicle of the year 1926, and monographs on medieval narrative, on rhetoric in the French Revolution, on Zola, and on the aesthetics of sport. His most recent publications in English are: In 1926-Living at the Edge of Time (Harvard University Press, 1997); The Powers of Philology (University of Illinois Press, 2003); and Production of Presence (Stanford University Press, 2004). Forthcoming is In Praise of Athletic Beauty, (Harvard University Press, 2006).
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