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Famous Men) and the poem Africa, in which he acknowledged his debt to the ancient Greek and Latin
authors, and for which he was crowned with a laurel wreath by the Senate and the people of Rome — a
wreath which he later placed on the high altar at St. Peter’s. Pictures of him at this time show a gaunt,
irritable-looking man with a large nose and nervous eyes, and one imagines that age must have done little
to appease his restlessness.
A portrait of Petrarch in a fourteenth-century manuscript of De viris illustribus. (photo credit 4.3)
In the Secretum meum, Petrarch (under his Christian name, Francesco) and Augustine sit and talk in a
garden, watched by the unwavering eye of Lady Truth. Francesco confesses that he is weary of the vain
bustle of the city; Augustine replies that Francesco’s life is a book like those in the poet’s library, but one
that Francesco does not yet know how to read, and reminds him of several texts on the subject of
madding crowds — including Augustine’s own. “Don’t these help you?” he asks. Yes, Francesco answers,
at the time of reading they are very helpful, but “as soon as the book leaves my hands, all my feeling for it
vanishes.”
Augustine: This manner of reading is now quite common; there’s such a mob of lettered men.… But if
you’d jot down a few notes in their proper place, you’d easily be able to enjoy the fruit of your reading.
Francesco: What kind of notes do you mean?
Augustine: Whenever you read a book and come across any wonderful phrases which you feel stir or
delight your soul, don’t merely trust the power of your own intelligence, but force yourself to learn them
by heart and make them familiar by meditating on them, so that whenever an urgent case of affliction
arises, you’ll have the remedy ready as if it were written in your mind. When you come to any passages
that seem to you useful, make a firm mark against them, which may serve as lime in your memory, less
otherwise they might fly away.
What Augustine (in Petrarch’s imagining) suggests is a new manner of reading: neither using the book as
a prop for thought, nor trusting it as one would trust the authority of a sage, but taking from it an idea, a
phrase, an image, linking it to another culled from a distant text preserved in memory, tying the whole
together with reflections of one’s own — producing, in fact, a new text authored by the reader. In the
introduction to De viris illustribus, Petrarch remarked that this book was to serve the reader as “a sort of
artificial memory” of “dispersed” and “rare” texts, and that he not only had collected them but, more
important, had lent them an order and a method. To his readers in the fourteenth century, Petrarch’s
claim was astonishing, since the authority of a text was self-established and the reader’s task was that of
an outside observer; a couple of centuries later, Petrarch’s personal, re-creative, interpretative, collating
form of reading would become the common method of scholarship throughout Europe. Petrarch comes
upon this method in the light of what he calls “divine truth”: a sense which the reader must possess, must
be blessed with, to pick and choose and interpret his way through the temptations of the page. Even the
author’s intentions, when surmised, are not of any particular value in judging a text. This, Petrarch
suggests, must be done through one’s own recollection of other readings, into which flows the memory
which the author set down on the page. In this dynamic process of give and take, of pulling apart and
piecing together, the reader must not exceed the ethical boundaries of truth — whatever the reader’s
conscience (we would say common sense) dictates these to be. “Reading,” wrote Petrarch in one of his
many letters, “rarely avoids danger, unless the light of divine truth shines upon the reader, teaching what
to seek and what to avoid.” This light (to follow Petrarch’s image) shines differently on all of us, and
differently also at the various stages of our lives. We never return to the same book or even to the same
page, because in the varying light we change and the book changes, and our memories grow bright and
dim and bright again, and we never know exactly what it is we learn and forget, and what it is we
remember. What is certain is that the act of reading, which rescues so many voices from the past,
preserves them sometimes well into the future, where we may be able to make use of them in brave and
unexpected ways.
When I was ten or eleven, one of my teachers in Buenos Aires tutored me in the evenings in German and
European history. To improve my German pronunciation, he encouraged me to memorize poems by Heine,
Goethe and Schiller, and Gustav Schwab’s ballad “Der Ritter und der Bodensee”, in which a rider gallops
across the frozen Lake of Constance and, on realizing what he has accomplished, dies of fright on the far
shore. I enjoyed learning the poems but I didn’t understand of what use they might possibly be. “They’ll
keep you company on the day you have no books to read,” my teacher said. Then he told me that his
father, murdered in Sachsenhausen, had been a famous scholar who knew many of the classics by heart
and who, during his time in the concentration camp, had offered himself as a library to be read to his
fellow inmates. I imagined the old man in that murky, relentless, hopeless place, approached with a
request for Virgil or Euripides, opening himself up to a given page and reciting the ancient words for his
bookless readers. Years later, I realized that he had been immortalized as one of the crowd of roaming
book-savers in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
A text read and remembered becomes, in that redemptive rereading, like the frozen lake in the poem I
memorized so long ago — as solid as land and capable of supporting the reader’s crossing, and yet, at the
same time, its only existence is in the mind, as precarious and fleeting as if its letters were written on
water.
The illustrious reader Beatus Rhenanus, book-collector and editor. (photo credit 4.4)
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