Centuries-Old Murmuring

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

- The Name of the Rose, Terce, Fourth Day, by Umberto Eco.



Yes!

Often it takes the writings of another to pull concrete images from the nebulous half-formed thoughts swirling about my cerebral timepoint. Or perhaps not-so-concrete images; images possibly in the wet cement of the latest work of the latest Gallic artiste.

Books talking to books … “centuries-old murmuring” in the library, long after the lights go out and the last human being leaves the building … does not this “murmuring” occur at a frequency inaccessible to human ears, not unlike a canine whistle, though more likely occurring, to my intuition, at much lower frequencies, ULFs, too slow and ponderous for us overbusy gnats to perceive?

And following these thoughts, does a book “scream” when it’s burned? A terrifying thought …