ST. AUGUSTINE'S COMPUTER.

• Author: Manguel, Alberto

Automated reading that requires no readers; the act of reading left to old-fashioned cranks who believe in books not as monsters but as places for dialogue; books transformed into a memory carried about until the mind caves in and the spirit fails ... These scenarios suit the last years of our century: the end of books set against the end of time, the end of the second millennium. At the end of the first, the Adamites burnt their libraries before joining their brethren in preparation for the Apocalypse, so as not to carry useless wisdom into the promised Kingdom of Heaven.

Our fears are endemic fears, rooted in our time. They don't branch into the unknown future, they demand a conclusive answer, here and now. "Stupidity," wrote Flaubert, "consists in a desire to conclude."

Indeed. As every reader knows, the point, the essential quality of the act of reading, now and always, is that it tends to no foreseeable end, to no conclusion. Every reading prolongs another, begun in some afternoon thousands of years ago and of which we know nothing; every reading...