The Extinction Club Page 8

  When I am not griping about my paper quality I am looking for excuses to go out to get more books to read.

  My father-in-law takes a morning nap sitting in a chair on the roof of the building with his head wrapped in a towel to protect himself from the sun. The roof has been turned into a terrace with lots of plant pots and a trellis that partially shades out the sun. There are extremely realistic plastic vine leaves and grapes weaving over the trellis. When he finishes his nap I take over the terrace for my writing.

  A further trellis that runs along the top of the wall around the terrace causes one to look up rather than out. Though it is December, the sky is always blue, and in the sun it is warm enough to wear just a shirt.

  But even on this great terrace I think more about reading than writing.

  HANLIN

  THE HANLIN Academy, the famed “Forest of Pencils,” contained the hive of examination cells where scholars from all over China were locked for nine days and nights while writing an “eight-legged essay.” They slept and ate in the tiny five-foot by three-foot cells with meager bowls of cold rice pushed under the wooden gates each evening by suspicious invigilators intent on unmasking fraud.

  They were right to be suspicious—in the quarter next to the Tsungli Yamen there were seamstresses capable of such minute embroidery that a whole book could be reduced to a tapestry of quotations tailored into the armpit of a gown.

  The first exams had tested a wide range of subjects, from philosophy to horticulture. But by the late Ming they had become formalized into the rigorous literary form of interpreting the Confucian classics, the pa gu wen, or eight-legged essay. For six hundred years, mastery of this strange prose-poetry form was necessary for advancement as a mandarin. There is no Western equivalent of such a form. The nearest might be Kant’s antimonies, where two opposing arguments are developed in columns side by side. But in the eight-legged essay, the columns answer and contrast with each other in tonality as well as content, like “a team of paired hoses.”

  READING ROOM

  IREMEMBERED THAT smell—dry as dust, a hint of vinyl padded seats, the sweetness of floor polish, and dead books in rows, waiting to be exhumed. My reading ticket had been easy to obtain, once I had overcome my lingering qualms about going back to the place where I spent so much time not working so many years ago.

  The Philosophy reading room in the Bodleian Library had hardly changed in twelve years. There were the same ever-so-comfy wraparound padded seats with arms that had sent me so unfailingly to sleep. The only noticeable change was the ugly rank of computer terminals near the book-ordering desk. The computers hummed and spread their mess of wires down the back of the table and across the floor. A few students were using them, but most were sitting at the tables—each with its own light—with a pile of books and paper in front of them. The students even seemed to be dressed the way I remembered students in my day dressing. Maybe they were a little less scruffy now, but I couldn’t be sure. I revisited several old bookshelves, found a book by Collingwood, which was one of the few set texts I remembered reading with pleasure, stared aggressively at the computers, and left.

  In a few years, nearly every book in the library will be on the Net. There will be no need to visit the library and fall asleep anymore, and that has to be a good development. Students can spend all their time in their rooms, which is what they like doing best anyway. The only reason to visit the library will be to look at unpublished manuscripts, the design and typography of old books, and to get a nostalgic buzz.

  Of course, some books won’t get onto the Net. Books published abroad by obscure publishers, or books the Bodleian committee have mislaid, or don’t like for some reason.

  Francis Bacon warned in the sixteenth century that many ancient scientific works were being ignored by the new printers. Since there were no monks working as scribes anymore, these books would die. Evidence from maps—which were still required to be copied by hand—suggests that exactly this did happen. A few old maps survived, but the books that supported the knowledge they contained died. Why? Because in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, people weren’t interested in science. They wanted books of religion and entertainment and belles lettres. It was rather like the switch from LPs to CDs—the CDs in existence now are those that are in fashion now. No one is busy making CD versions of those LPs you find with chewed corners in the chuck-out box in a charity shop.

  One sign that knowledge is at risk is how much effort we make to preserve what we already have. Ignore the efforts to find more knowledge—after all, we’re not even sure it is knowledge until we’ve had it for a few years. And we’re doing quite badly on the preservation of what we have. The British Museum employs seventy conservators. If the museum stopped acquiring books, it would still take those seventy conservators a hundred years to repair all the books that need repairing. In a hundred years, many books will simply crumble into dust. In fact, many will never be preserved, because the number of new books acquired each year is rising.

  In some American libraries they have taken to ripping the books apart and scanning material in or recording it on microfilm and then simply burning what remains of the original text. The fires have already begun.

  Every advance in information technology involves choosing what you want to preserve and what you want to ditch. Scanning rare books onto microfilm is a costly business. The library won’t let you do it yourself-—they decide first which books should be scanned and which should just rot away in the basement.

  Against that eventuality, people should start hoarding the kinds of books committees of rational people will decide against scanning into a database.

  BOOK DEATH II

  ICASUALLY MENTIONED above about the books that get mislaid by library staff. But until it happens to you, with a book you really need, then it doesn’t really make much impact. I mean, why should you care? It’s just theory. But when it happens, the whole fragile edifice of the library becomes apparent.

  I was in the Oriental reading room, using that as a base for ordering books from the colossal stacks of the Bodleian. It’s a copyright library, so they should have every book ever published in Britain plus a pretty substantial amount from abroad. They have warehouses out in the countryside just groaning with books; sometimes they have to send someone out in a van to pick up your book from there. And beneath the whole of Oxford are vaults full of books, with an underground railway like something out of James Bond running from building to building deep under the tarmac.

  The book I ordered was a diary of the Boxer Rebellion by Jessie Ransome called The Story of the Siege Hospital in Peking. The book was on the CD catalog of books published before 1920; it was on the computer, so it must be there.

  I waited several hours and then went back for my book. The news wasn’t good. They couldn’t find it. The librarian had been herself to have a look, but there was no sign. No one had made any note of this, and because the system is computerized and since no one really knows how it works, there is no way of recording the loss, like scribbling a note on a file card, or even taking the file card out as an aide-mémoire for a later search.

  That book, published in 1901, is now, within the hallowed confines of the Bodleian, certifiably dead. There is probably one in the British Museum, so it isn’t desperate, but what is strange, or seems so to me, is that the book is registered as existing. If there was a fire in the Bod, then they would assume that the book had been burned, when in fact it had long been missing—lost or stolen, who can tell?

  Historians are now of the opinion that both the great fire of the Hanlin Library and the fire of the library in Alexandria were actually rather convenient, since most of the books had in fact already been stolen or had simply rotted away. The fire merely drew a neat line under the whole miserable decline of the place.

  This is how knowledge really dies, slowly, bit by bit, hardly noticed.

  KEY TEXTS

  THE JESSIE RANSOME fiasco reminded me of a central tenet of student
life—the concept of the key text. The tutor would hand out a reading list with a hundred book titles to choose from. Only one would be the key text. The game was to find it and rewrite the crucial sections in order to score an alpha grade for the weekly essay. If the key text was not obvious, then the last recourse was to ask students in the year above. To write an essay without knowing the key text was a surefire way to a delta. This early programming was now apparent. Deep down, I believed that every subject had a key text.

  The key text about Milu would start at the beginning, outlining the fossil record of Milu’s ancestors (three-pronged old-world deer), move to sites where Milu remains have been found (Honshu in Japan as well as all over mainland China), proceed at length through the relevant ancient Chinese texts, contain a blow-by-blow account of mating, feeding, and territory-marking rituals (males splash their urine by swinging their penises from side to side with a slight upward flick at the end of each lateral movement). Such a book would be based on the lifetime experiences of a Milu watcher like Maja Boyd, the world’s expert on Milu (who had not yet responded to my attempts to get in touch).

  I had been looking for such a book since the beginning, but sadly even the vast resources of the Bodleian Library could not supply me with it. Recovering from this blow, I redirected my search to discover key texts of lesser magnitude and greater specialization. The Jessie Ransome memoir, based on her siege diary, was supposed to be such a minor key text.

  After reading a key text I’d have to feel I’d not only been there but that I would know the significance of any fact I subsequently came across in that field. Not knowing the significance of a fact is the most worrying thing, if you’re trying to get to the bottom of a subject.

  On one level the key text is just another word for a good crib. But for me it means more than that. There is a certain feel, almost an atmosphere given off, when you pick up a book in which the author knows what he is talking about and is able to communicate the important parts of his subject. Such a book is a key text. There will be an absence of jargon in a key text, since no one who really loves their subject can bear to see it shrouded in jargon. Unfortunately, the demands of modern science often mean jargon is inescapable. For this reason many key texts were written in the past, before scientific hegemony was achieved. People looked at things just as hard in the past, and in areas where looking is important—for example, in wildlife and nature observation—old books are often superior to the impersonal compilations now produced.

  X MARKS THE SPOT

  LEARNING HOW to get better at spotting a key text is not easy. It requires hours of dedicated browsing in libraries or bookshops, both new and secondhand. You can’t learn this skill on the Internet. It certainly isn’t taught in school, because most teachers don’t have the skill themselves. And at university it may be hinted at, but all too often, as I have mentioned, it is simply for use as a crib. The significance of the key text is far more than that, and the ability to spot them is akin to having the art collector’s “eye.”

  Which isn’t to say one can’t learn. Spending hours in bookshops and libraries gives one an overview of many subjects. It acquaints you with many books, and gradually, just as a wine taster develops a nose, the bookhead develops the ability to know how good a book is just by picking it up and flipping through a few pages. I’m not talking about fiction here; rather I’m talking about books that want to communicate information and know-how about a subject.

  And strangely, when you know about the key-text concept, key text come looking for you, turning up (sometimes) at your fingertips just when you’ve expressed an interest in a subject. There are all sorts of rational explanations for this, but I find none of them convincing.

  RESUSCITATION

  IWAS STARTING to accumulate quite a library of my own. I used the excuse of writing about Milu to spend a lot of money on books about China, deer, and conservation. I could claim it back against tax, I told my wife. Actually, like most readers, I love buying books, especially in quantity. In a few years I can quite see myself going to auctions and bidding for boxes full of books I haven’t even looked at, random selections of books, on the off chance of there being a gem buried in all the garbage. I could have a complex of sheds in my back garden full of these unopened crates of books. When things got dull I could just go out back and root around, looking for some lost masterpiece.

  I was hoping that the key text (whether on Boxers, deer, or conservation) would turn up in a secondhand bookshop if it wasn’t in the library. Oxford only has two or three half-decent secondhand bookshops, which is pathetic for a town of its pretensions. I visited these a few times a week, like a hunter-gatherer visiting known sources of nuts and fruit. I grazed the shelves looking for nutrition, and in the process bought a lot of books I may well never read.

  In one of the better bookshops I found an old copy of one of the Novelist’s novels, the one that had been pulped. When I next saw him he autographed it for me. I felt that in some way we had brought it back to life.

  CABINET

  THE FRENCH chargé d’affaires hinted to the Chinese that a live Milu specimen would be considered a great gift to the West. Since the current emperor was less than sixteen, it was up to the dowager empress to decide whether a deer should be given or not. She took an interest in the Lazarist school, and when she heard about Père David’s cabinet de curiosités demanded that it be brought to the Forbidden Palace for her to see.

  The cabinet contained, among other stuffed and mounted rarities, a section devoted to bizarre animals: a tortoise with green hair sprouting from its shell, a one-horned gerbil with powerful hopping legs, and a goose embryo with a large barnacle growing on its back. All passed close examination as genuine animals. In fact, the green hair was a cleverly introduced parasitic marine weed, which had been cropped after it had grown onto the tortoise’s shell. A skilled taxidermist had fixed a sheep’s horn onto the stuffed head of Dipus annuktus, a long-legged species of Mongolian gerbil, turning it into a miniature unicorn; the barnacle “shellbird” was another test of the taxidermist’s ingenuity, which used casein, dried albumen, to cover the join between shell and embryo. As Père David confided to his diary, “The Chinese are the cleverest frauds in the world.”

  The dowager empress liked the cabinet of curiosities so much that it was conveniently forgotten and never returned.

  A month after the cabinet was moved to the palace, a live female deer was taken in considerable secrecy aboard a French steamer bound for Cochin China and home.

  COMPETITION

  SOON THE Germans heard about Milu. And the British. And the Italians. Before long there was a regular exodus of deer from the forbidden park. It became a measure of a country’s status, whether it could bully the Chinese into handing over one of their prized Su Bu Xiang.

  The scramble for the deer exactly mirrors the scramble for possessions in China. From 1860 onward, every country with a navy and some ambition wanted a piece of China. As the Chinese saying has it, “The melon was sliced.”

  (i) Russia seized territory north of Amur.

  (ii) Britain and France razed the Peking Summer Palace as a

  (iii) reprisal for Chinese brutality.

  (iv) France occupied Annam.

  (v) Britain annexed Lower Burma.

  (vi) France annexed Lower Cochin China.

  (vii) Russia occupied Chinese Turkestan.

  (viii) Japan took the Liuchiu Islands.

  (ix) Britain annexed Upper Burma.

  (x) France took the whole of what later became Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

  Every demand for territory met with grudging Chinese acquiescence, their hand forced by the gunboats anchored off the coast. Only the poor Italians met with a rebuff when they demanded Sanmen Bay in 1899. Without a Pacific navy it was all bluster, and after three months of being ignored by the Chinese authorities, they withdrew.

  This successful face-off with the West prompted the dowager empress to step up her antipathy toward the fo
reign devils. Earlier that year she had been forced to host her first meeting with the wives of the foreign ministers. Now she announced that she found the blue eyes of foreign women disgusting, as they reminded her of cats, which she detested.

  END

  PERE DAVID was off on his travels again. This time across to Xian province in search of a great white bear. His persistence paid off yet again, and he was able to add another name to the books by finding the giant panda.

  But his health was now starting to give way. Dr. Martin of the French legation was adamant. To stay any longer in China, with its extremes of climate, would kill him.

  Père David took this news very badly. He had many more trips planned. But in some ways it must also have been a relief. When someone of reputedly strong health, like Père David, starts to suffer from repeated illness, there is often a psychological factor at work. Perhaps he really wanted to come home.

  Père David returned to the Basque country, to Espelette, to the house of his birth, with a pet spider he had brought all the way back from China. He amused his nephews and great-nephews with this tame arachnid, which he kept tethered by a silk thread wound around its body.