Summer Reading
Travelling in Time and Geography
One of my favorite places is the New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd St. This last visit took me through my personal history, US history, and the world of ideas.
A number of my books were born here, specifically in the Rare Books and Manuscripts and Archives Divisions. And the New York Public Library (NYPL) became a protagonist as well. How could it not? It has beauty, history, mystery, lovers, enemies, and verse, prose, and hieroglyphics in all languages. In other words, a perfect character.
So many emotions I have experienced in the NYPL, from awe to helplessness, from anger to love. I remember falling in love one afternoon with an agile, determined and brainy fencer. The NYPL would team with a midtown fencing academy to stage bouts out on its gardens. I carry the tip of her épée in my heart, metaphorically, as the goal in fencing is perforating the opponent’s heart, and the girl defeated me once and again.
Another object of my affection was a serene and elegant history professor, a medievalist. I was in the middle, literally, of a book that took me seven years to write. A book about an insolent woman who refused to be not educated, who refused to be a secondary character in her medieval times, and not only she attended the university of Salamanca impersonating a man, but she penned her own history of the world, an anecdotic Jewish perspective that ended up miscatalogued in the Manuscripts and Archives Division almost five hundred years later. The medievalist professor, sensing I was more interested in what her cleavage insinuated than in her explanations — for love is just as hard to hide as the sun with one finger — sentenced: Raul, sex begins and ends in the brain.
Since my college days in New York, the NYPL has been home away from home. Sometimes the true and only home. Fastforward to May 2022. My heart palpitated faster as I approached the Beaux-Arts building with the sculpted lions, Patience and Fortitude, out to receive me.
Before going in, I went around the building for a glass of prosecco overlooking Bryant Park, stage for New York’s Fashion Week. It rained for a while and then drizzled. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed reading the broadsheet Financial Times in the Library’s outdoor bar, occasionally glancing at a young couple of mimes dancing in the rain. Crypto Crash read the headline.
I went in.
I went up.
Photo Shoot
The idea was for my wife to capture the man I was, the man who the NYPL makes me be, a photo for the back cover of my next book — a novel thinly veiling a biography of my grandfather, a man who loved silence, solitude, women, venoms and thought.
He proposed a steep fine for every unnecessary word pronounced by public officials during official proceedings, to teach the masses by example to think before one spoke, he said. Of course, he was vituperated as enemy of public speech, and ridiculed. He closed the door behind him and never set a foot out again. He lived alone for thirty-five years. That he lived alone is a figure: half a dozen maids took care of his every desire.
I loved visiting him as a child. Father and I would take the train to go see him in his remote city up at the Andes. He waited for us with succulent lunches served. Grandfather, I asked him, why you invent venoms? At age five, I didn’t know venom derived from Venus, the Roman Goddess of Love, and that venoms originally connoted aphrodisiacs.
He took me to the back-gardens and fruit orchards following a corridor lined by geraniums, dwarf lemon trees and cement benches. The corridor separated the main house from a series of buildings, kitchen, storage room, maids' apartment, experimentation room, punishment chamber, peons lodge, and the stable. I can still recall the aroma of jasmines, mint, the rosebushes, and quince, figs, peaches, babaco — a papaya mutated to the template temperatures of the uplands. Grandfather kept a medicinal garden back there. “For one species to live, another must be eliminated,” he explained. “For your health, for you to go on living, viruses and harmful parasites must be eliminated. For plants to flourish, certain insects must be eliminated.”
He sprayed his venoms around a number of plants. Insecticide, he said, derived from insect and the Latin cida, to kill. Many words were based on cida. Pesticide, kill pests; homicide, kill human; and the unthinkable for a child, patricide, kill father. I asked him if there was a word for kill grandfather. Grandfather slapped me on the back of the head. He didn’t mean to hurt me, but he had a heavy hand. “Questions define you,” he said, or I remember him saying. “Questions must lead to further understanding. Imbeciles and drunks ask what everyone knows, or things for which there is no answer.” How was I supposed to know what questions had no answer? I bit my tongue. Instead, I asked if imbecile had meanings beyond very dumb. Grandfather defined imbecile as mentally weak. In Roman times it was used for people who couldn’t walk without the support of a cane. The sense of physical infirmity in time also applied to intellectual atrophy.
I found in the NY Public Library this photo of Grandfather from 1941.
My love of libraries comes from him. Grandfather had a small library with shelves filled with bottles in all shapes and colors more than books. In his early youth, Grandfather opened a pharmacy and invented all kinds of venoms to eradicate an outbreak of the Bubonic plague that the newly inaugurated railway brought to the uplands of Ecuador. His venoms killed rats and other animals that carried the infected fleas.
Two books outstood in his library, the Dictionary by the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, the 1880 edition, and the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt’s View of the Cordillera, a memoir of his passage through Ecuador in 1802. A distant relative of grandfather accompanied Humboldt from Ecuador all the way to Peru, Mexico, and the young republic of the United Sates, traveling by foot, horse, mule and boat. They visited President Jefferson in the White House, still under construction, and spent a weekend in Monticello. Jefferson considered Humboldt the most erudite man of his time, and having spent a year in Mexico studying mines, roads, natural resources, demographics, his information proved invaluable to understand the vastness of a Louisiana he had just purchased from Napoleon, and for the Manifest Destiny ideology, which some Mexican intellectuals define as God made me annex my neighbors’ territories. The NYPL does have an original copy of Humboldt’s View of the Cordillera. I consulted it to illustrate the new novel. Humboldt came to Ecuador determined to summit Mount Chimborazo; a dormant volcano believed at the time to be the tallest in the world, taller than Mount Everest. He did not summit it but prefaced one hundred years in advance the railway engineering feat that pushed a locomotive up the Andes, one of the most difficult railways ever built.
It was in the NYPL that I learned about the origins of Ecuador’s railway. A bunch of New York socialites and politicians were the first investors, including members of the Vanderbilt and Pierce families, the mayor and a senator. In charge of the project was a West Point graduate, Major John Hartman.
Apart from those two books, I retained in my memory from Grandfather’s library: 1. A human brain floating in a yellowish liquid inside a crystal bowl. (One of the maids told me, and I was an impressionable child, that it belonged to an impertinent relative.) And right next to the human brain of the impertinent relative — overly talkative — five volumes of the French Encyclopedia.
“Encyclopedias are reasoned compendiums of human knowledge, the work of many contributors, sometimes experts, sometimes opinionated fools,” volunteered Grandfather. “An armchair Dutch naturalist, contributor of the French Encyclopedia, Dr. Buffon, posited that the American continent corrupts species, making even dogs smaller. Thomas Jefferson took issue with his nonsense and sent him the bones of a North American bison and fossils of a mastodon. Along he sent a note recommending the encyclopedia invested in better fact-checking.”
To my surprise, the New York Public Library had a new exhibit showcasing its treasures. An item exhibited was an original volume of the French Encyclopedia, or Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, of the Arts and Measurements.
The first encyclopedic article I wrote, a botanical essay on bananas, the fruit of the genus Musa, of the family Musaceae, one of the most important fruit crops of the world, I dedicated to the memory of Grandfather. (Encyclopedia Latina: History, Culture, and Society in The United States.)
The Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures
For more than 125 years, The New York Public Library has collected, preserved and made accessible the world’s knowledge. Now, for the first time, the NYPL showcases some of the most extraordinary items from the 56 million in their collections. The official word is to inspire and empower visitors to discover, learn, and create new knowledge.
The treasures in this exhibition tell the stories of people, places, and moments spanning 4,000 years — from the emergence of the written word to the present day. Visitors will encounter manuscripts, artworks, letters, still and moving images, recordings, and more that bring vividly to life voices of the past. “While the Library’s collections have always been available for public use, the Polonsky Exhibition offers a unique opportunity to make new connections and expand our understanding of the world and each other — so that together we can shape a better future,” said one of the curators.
Personal Highlights
A handwritten draft of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. On June 11, 1776, the Second Continental Congress entrusted a committee of five delegates (Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston and Roger Sherman) with composing the Declaration of Independence. They chose Thomas Jefferson to draft what he called an expression of the American mind. There are six extant drafts, but only one copy is referred to as the “original rough draft” with edits by Franklin, Adams and the Congress. It is found in the Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress. The copy exhibited in the NYPL is one of the six extant drafts. The Declaration of Independence starts with a lesson for the ages: When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them… They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…
Also, the handwritten draft of George Washington’s Farewell Address, which was never delivered in person to any assembly but published in newspapers ten weeks before the 1796 elections — Washington decided not to seek a third term. Though the document contains Washington’s ideas, it was mostly written by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. President Washington warns the American people to be suspicious of anyone who seeks to abandon the Union, to secede a portion of the country from the rest or weaken the bonds holding together the constitutional union. To promote the strength of the Union, he urges citizens to place their identity as Americans above their identities as members of a state, city, or region, and to focus their efforts and affection on the country above all other local interests.
Moving further back to the 1300s, an illuminated book, beautiful piece of calligraphy and art. The Mahzor is a prayer book that Jews use on the High Holy Days, containing the liturgy for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
Moving up to the mid-19th century, and speaking of writing, the chair and desk of Charles Dickens. One can infer that he penned the memorable opening lines of Tale of Two Cities sitting on this chair: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Life, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way-in short…
The Photo
Back to the reading room on the third floor, just across from the Rare Books and Manuscripts and Archives Divisions, to take the photo for the back cover of the next book. My wife, Aurea — Latin for golden — is Dominican, joyful by nature, smiley. I, on the contrary, consider faking a smile for the camera nonsensical, or, to use her colloquialism: I always come out in photos with a machete face. That is, as if about to duel an impertinent bore.
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