I love second hand books. They are books that breath, that have lived, in other places & other times. You sometimes find the name or marginalia notes or even laundry receipts of those who owned them before. Who were they? Secondhand books and secondhand bookshops are a special pleasure. They have a past

“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” 📚Orwell

One of the giants of Windsor Castle’s Royal Library: John James Audubon’s Birds of America. 4 volumes, 435 hand-coloured, life-size bird prints—so big they were made on rare “Double Elephant” paper. [📹 royalcollectiontrust]

“You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.” — Kurt Vonnegut

Thinking Zone. Tuesday afternoon in my small Black Sea village, my Greek coffee is in front of me, and humanity has once again done something so exquisitely absurd that for a moment one wonders whether history is not being written by a satirist: after spending decades removing books from our homes, giving away our grandparents’ libraries because “they take up space,” leaving old editions to gather dust and, with admirable technological cheerfulness, moving memory outside our own heads, we have suddenly discovered that old books contain... knowledge. The news is almost perfect. Companies connected with the development of artificial intelligence are buying enormous quantities of old, rare and out-of-print books because they contain something that is beginning to become scarce on the internet: text written by humans before the invasion of machine-generated content. There are already documented cases of millions of books being purchased, their bindings cut off, their pages scanned, and the physical copies subsequently destroyed. The latest investigation from yesterday traces a shipment of rare books all the way to a facility used for AI training. The horror! Books have turned out to be useful. This is exactly where I thought of Emperor Claudius. Not the Claudius of the popular image, the stammering, disabled and slightly ridiculous uncle of Caligula whom the Praetorians find after the emperor’s assassination and, by virtue of one of the splendid jokes of Roman history, turn into Caesar, but the other Claudius, the scholar, the insatiable reader, the man who wrote histories of the Etruscans and Carthaginians, an autobiography and a work on the Roman alphabet, almost all of it lost. Here is the first unpleasant fact about human civilisation: knowledge can disappear. Then I thought of Umberto Eco, which, where books are concerned, is almost a professional reflex, because Eco understood perfectly well that a library is not a warehouse for information but a machine against oblivion, and he built an entire novel around a library in which power over books means power over what people are allowed to know. And somewhere between Claudius and Eco stand we. With a phone containing practically the entire world, and with an ever diminishing need to contain anything within ourselves. Once, a person had to remember a poem, a date, a name, an argument, a route, a telephone number; then we decided that memory was a tedious administrative function and successively delegated it to the notebook, the computer, Google, the cloud, and finally artificial intelligence, until knowledge gradually ceased to be something we possess and became something to which we have access. The difference seems insignificant only until access disappears. And now comes the magnificent reversal: the machines to which we delegated knowledge are setting off in search of the books we no longer considered it necessary to read, because they need precisely the human knowledge we left to gather dust. The circle is almost complete. The human says: “Why should I know it? I’ll ask AI.” AI replies: “Excellent. Just let me buy your grandfather’s library.” And at this point Claudius would probably begin stammering with indignation, while Eco would ask for another bottle of wine and write six hundred pages. I have only Greek coffee. But I am beginning to look at my own books with a certain smugness. It turns out they are not gathering dust. They are waiting for humanity to remember why it wrote them.

10th August is the feast of St Lawrence whose martyrdom is depicted in the initial 'S'(anctum), with the Emperor Valerian ordering the martyrdom of Christians. BnF MS Latin 11700; Homiliarium Corbeiense, III pars ;12th century (1179 CE); France (Corbie); f.64v @GallicaBnF

If anyone needs me, I’ll be taking a break to read in my study…

"To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering." — Friedrich Nietzsche

'Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.' -Albert Einstein, advice to his son Eduard, 5 Feb. 1930. (Photo: Einstein rides a bicycle in Santa Barbara, California, 1933, Caltech Archives)

The Botafumeiro is one of the most spectacular traditions of Santiago de Compostela Cathedral: eight tiraboleiros swing a 53 kg giant censer through the nave at speeds of up to 68 km/h. The ritual has been performed since at least the 12th century.

"You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending." 📚C.S. Lewis

"The pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in searching for it." 📚Tolstoy