I was reminded of the Book of Kells today. One could legitimately consider a pilgrimage to it; though not due to conventional religiosity but, rather, as a bibliophile; yet not as a bibliophile, who glorifies either the visual complexity of the book or the way in which someone has ruminated over the old gospels – as if bored or uninterested to read something new – filling the margins and empty spaces with endless, colourful scribblings. The journey would take place to downshift the pilgrim's fetish for pretty books: to accept by heart the value of literature on sparser surfaces. Once and for all.
I already doubt the validity of my proposed tension between complex and austere. This is not because every scribbling has its end. The Book of Kells is far from being a single literary work, even if such things are thought to exist. I now see moments of austerity everywhere in its coastal labyrinths of death.
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