Talk by Dean Daniele C. Struppa, in honor of the George Mason University Libraries. 1,000,000th volume celebration delivered on April 2nd, 2003.

In this, like in many of his other works, Borges tells us that Paradise is like a library, at least for some of us, and his poem talks, in a sense, about the collecting of books, atlases, and encyclopedias. As such it leads us to ask ourselves .what is collecting? Why do we collect?. and more pointedly, .why do we collect books?.

I believe that collecting books, but, for that matter, collecting anything, begins as an act of love. We collect what we love, but more precisely we collect what we believe represents us. As we collect, we make a statement about ourselves. And so, when I hold in my hands a book of Euclid, I am saying, .I am a mathematician, I care about mathematics. I care about my community, and about the people who made it great. I am an intellectual descendant of Euclid, and of Clavius, the Jesuit father who in 1600 collected and commented on Euclid.s work.. As I collect, I define a community, I state the rules of membership, I make a claim for an intellectual tradition. As I collect the works of Euclid, of Newton, of Lagrange, I make a loud claim to my firm footing in the western tradition. A tradition, which began with the Greeks, and which has been devoted to a search for the logos, in the continuous attempt to resolve some of the fundamental problems posed more than 2,000 years ago.

But there is more to collecting, than just a statement about our membership in a group.

Collecting has something sensual, almost carnal, you could almost say the other side of love. When I hold a book, I exert at least 4 of my senses. I like to .look. at the book, and admire its drawing, and its characters. I like the sound of the old pages, the crackle they make as I turn them (even the computer game .Myst., some of you may remember, simulated this noise, which is obviously a pleasant one, a noise which talks to us about some archetypes in our collective memory). I like to .feel. the book, I like the roughness, the rigidity, the texture of the page, I like the feeling that the letters are almost like sculptures on the book, I like its binding, the sensuous feel of the animal skin which has been used to bind the words of Euclid. And finally, please do not think I am sick, I like the smell of the pages.mmm.the smell of old paper and, probably, of spores which have accumulated on these pages for, now, 600 years.

In this sense, collecting (books, but probably anything) is a displacement of our affection from the natural object to its container. I replace my love for mathematics, with the love for the books, which contain mathematics. In this sense, like in the arena of the senses, I am a fetishist: I replace hard theorems, with their cartaceous counterpoint. So yes, a labor of love, but with some strange, though intriguing, twists.

Collecting books represents my love for math, and my fetish for paper. But it has a deeper intellectual meaning. I always thought of the liberal arts as a dialogue, a dialogue across space and across time. As we prove new theorems, as we invent new theories, as we write new stories, or we tell ancient stories with new languages, we are not alone, but we are in the presence of colleagues, friends, coworkers, students, on every part of the globe (culture is, really, global, and as the friendship between Galileo and Kepler demonstrates, this globalization had begun way before the word was invented). At the same time, we are in a dialogue with the scholars of the past, and the scholars of the future. The way by which we communicate with the scholars of the past are the books they wrote, and holding in our hands one of those books is, in fact, a way to represent, embody, this dialogue.

When I open this book of Euclid, I know that I am holding a book, which was probably studied in some convent, by some young friar, and that this book was the object of discussions, studies, and controversies. I am now physically connected with that friar, with his friends, his teachers, and his students. When I hold an ancient copy of the Elements, I cannot avoid thinking of Fra Gerolamo Sacchieri, and his .Euclides ab omni naevo vindicatus. in which he tried to prove the perfection of Euclid.s geometry.only to create (first in history, but without realizing it) the first non-Euclidean geometry.

Finally, I realize that my collection, and really all collections are time machines. The books we have are the surest way to travel across time, and to give us a direct image of what the past looked like. And as I write my new book (and today, a happy coincidence, my colleagues Irene and Fabrizio presented me with the final version of our new book on computational analysis), I am preparing a time machine for the scholars, the mathematicians, of the future.

But there comes a point, in our life, when we realize.-finally.-that we cannot bring our things, our money, our collections on that final long trip which we all have to take. It is at that moment, when we make that realization, that our act of love towards our intellectual passion, needs to find a different outlet, an outlet in which the fetish is broken, and in which love turns from the inside to the outside.

When we realize that our collections represent ourselves, but that we will not be forever; when we realize that our collections represent our memories, and that our memories can and will outlast us; when we realize that we are not the only owners of these time-machines, it is at this moment that we know we need to find a more fulfilling way to express our love. The memories which are preserved in the collection, must be shared, the process of letting go, needs to begin, because in this process, is the beginning of a new phase, in which our love is transfigured, and becomes the shared love of our community. Those books, those autographs, which were so important for me as I was establishing my persona, are now even more important because they are now part of a new, different, more global, representation of my persona, the Library.

Leaving behind the noise of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically desiccated and preserved. Left and right, absorbed in their shining dreams, the readers. momentary profiles are sketched by the light of their bright officious lamps.My vanity and nostalgia have set up an impossible scene. Perhaps so (I tell myself), but tomorrow I too will have died, and our times will intermingle and chronology will be lost in a sphere of symbols. And then in some way it will be right to claim that I have brought you this book, and that you have accepted it.

(J.L.Borges, El Hacedor, August 9, 1960)