An Anarchist
in the Archives
(From The London Chronicle)
While waiting for a real job, I briefly
made my living stacking books in the London Library. It was like a prison in a film
noir, platforms of caged volumes, which could be taken out on parole for three
weeks before returning to a life sentence. One winter’s day the chain of my
bike broke and, wearing gloves to protect the books from my oily fingers, I
thumbed through the serried ranks of mounting cells, sorting the eternal
prisoners. The chief librarian, a fossil made flesh, came up behind me and
issued a reproof which startled browsers, unseen hitherto, as their cobwebbed
forms merged into the general gloom. ‘What is the world coming to?’ I took the
gloves off and handed them to him as though surrendering arms. He stomped off
through the echoing chambers, holding them between two fingers like a dead rat,
my knuckles truly rapped.
In revenge I left my
mark on the books that didn’t interest me and helped a few I fancied escape.
Once read, I released them like caged birds into the wild of second-hand
bookshops. It wasn’t the money but the principle. I even bought back one
myself. A little red book, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, by Balthasar
Gracian, the 17th century Spanish Jesuit. It distracted me from Bakunin
and Herzen, the anarchists. Gracian preached putting self-interest before
ethics, and the perfection of the self over changing the world. An avowed
interest in selfishness made me unfit for Prince Kropotkin, and unready for
Kafka and Kierkegaard. And so my inner life and reading reached stalemate.
I ventured forth in the
evenings with a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road conspicuously under
my arm. I wasn’t the only lonely soul in London looking for company. You could
spot them in pubs wearing Nouvelle Vague scarves and smoking Sweet
Afton, begging to be asked, what are you reading. Soon I had a circle of
passing acquaintances I could call on, talking late into the night, carried
away by our respective paperbacks, arguing each other into an impasse.
I had at last got round
to Kropokin’s The Conquest of Bread, and was violently against violence,
but believed in moral policing to make everybody toe the communal line for
their own good. I lost friends and made enemies. Ashamed that I had betrayed
Gracian’s wisdoms, and failed to become a hypocrite saint ‘whose virtue resides
in tolerance’. I had become sincere, and was chasing chimeras when what was
needed was ‘to be wise with the many rather than a fool all alone’. I withdrew
into a cloister with myself, and squared my contradictory thoughts by composing
jingles again like when I was a running boy. This time writing them down. I
shyly called them poems.
But next evening I was
once again the life and soul of the
party, burbling away to amuse myself, while others put up with me
wondering when I would stop. I had been reading Michael Polanyi on ‘tacit
knowledge’ (the kind you can’t explain but know you know). But my ‘passionate
outpourings of myself’ did not lead, as Polanyi promised, ‘to untried forms of
existence’, but to the same old arguments about Logical Positivism, and why do
you lose your temper when someone contradicts you? Staggering home in the small
hours through echoing streets, I drank in my reflection in puddles, as though I
was the only man in the world. I fell over a garbage can and the lid clattered
along the road before me. ‘Empty vessels make the most noise’, my mother
said.