some quotes that I liked from these essays:
“for what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?” (Benjamin 2)
“view from the outside, on the basis of a specific recognition from within” (Bhabha 19) – (this quote isn’t interpreted bellow, but I thought it was an interesting definition worth thinking about)
“suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books” (Manguel 4)
All interpretations on the concept of collections, or curation, or collecting. These made me think of Eisenstein’s “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form”, which demands that art spawns from the friction between organic and purposeful energy, but, combined with numerous common interpretations of art, the best art effectively (but not always actually) eliminates the purposeful energy and successfully encapsulates singular organic energy. Libraries are legitimate organic energy (group of books (mix of both energies) but combined, as a whole, they harbor mostly organic energy) – but, as Benjamin and Manguel suggests, organization systems – purposeful energy – attempt to limit this organic energy to serve purpose. But, I suppose, if you refuse to acknowledge this system, it wouldn’t exist and the library would be singularly magical.
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