The Name of the Rose

[rynling]

“I know your abbey has more books than any other Christian library. I know that in comparison with your cases, those of Bobbio or Pomposa, of Cluny or Fleury, seem the room of a boy barely being introduced to the abacus. I know that the six thousand codices that were the boast of Novalesa a hundred or more years ago are few compared to yours, and perhaps many of those are here now. I know your abbey is the only light that Christianity can oppose to the thirty-six libraries of Baghdad, to the ten thousand codices of the Vizir Ibn al-Alkami, that the number of your Bibles equals the two thousand four hundred Korans that are the pride of Cairo.”

There are two wolves inside of me. One wolf fiercely desires to have a library on the scale of Saint Michael's Abbey. The other wolf is Marie Kondo. They’re both good wolves, but damn if they don’t act in complete opposition to one another at all times.

Comments

[lassarina]

but a LIBRARY.

[rynling]

I will never understand why the ultrawealthy insist on doing dumb shit like blowing up rockets and buying untenanted highrises in Dubai for their investment portfolios when they could build their own Gothic library in a literal castle and then fill it with books. Guillotine the aristocracy, of course, but I feel like rich people in previous centuries were not wrong about certain things.