Part II - Re/tension

Summary

Holding back, or holding in? Keepsake or imperial reach? What does it mean to take stock of the world, and what are the repercussions of such attempts when absolute? To the degree that a millennial faith underlies ambitions to take full stock of an entire world (by collecting all known writings, for example, or by mapping all realms of knowledge, or by systematizing all aspects of Nature), is apocalypse equally and necessarily incumbent? Are such grand efforts made under the impress of desires to save the world from itself or to open the world to itself?

Here in Part II, Eric Casey explores the curiously longstanding oscillation between the millennial impulse of bibliographers to collect/protect every last scrap and the apocalyptic image of great libraries in ashes, paying particular attention to the sources supporting and legends crowding the ancient libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum. Does such a millennial enterprise as completed collection of the world's wisdom entail catastrophe as requisite punishment for a scholarly hubris, or is it a preemptive strike against the growing likelihood of failure across time, as gaps in a collection become more glaring and irremediable? Is apocalypse in this context an apt but cruel remedy, a pharmakon, to millennial illusions of comprehensiveness and the utopian ideal of universal comprehension?