Yesterday, my final delivery for this trip was at the Bodmer Library in Geneva Switzerland.
My schedule didn’t allow me to deliver it to the Vice-Director on Tuesday so I left Addendum, Edition 24 with Ugo Rodriguez. And then I went through the truly astounding Musee Bodmer. Breath-taking display of the word! A museum founded less on the incredible content of its holdings and more on the tradition of writing as being fundamentally human and humanizing.
I left overwhelmed by tears. There were fragments of Pasteur. Darwin’s Origins. Handwriting long before letterpress, across cultures and topics. The insistence of the mark thru time. A place founded on the transgressive act of writing more than the specific story.
A carved peace treaty in a nail. Borges handwritten Tlon Uqbar. Beckett, Shakespeare, Galileo, Pythagoras, Aristotle …
And of course Gutenberg’s bible with Hubay #30. I left painfully humbled and in a stupor of inconceivable gratitude.
In 32 days I delivered 24 copies of Addendum to 21 institutions in 20 cities. 12 accepted. 12 pending review.
I am extremely tired and over saturated. But in an effort to keep myself steady, my mind keeps returning to Huizinga’s Homo Ludens. That humanity’s greatest virtue is to seriously play. And story telling is one serious way to play- to play out one view point in the context of another’s, so that both may arrive at a shifting sense of meaning. Xo
