BATS IN THE LIBRARY

Per an article on the Smithsonian webpage, there are bat colonies in at least two Portuguese libraries which softly twitter on rainy afternoons, and emerge at dusk to feast on bugs which otherwise might damage the manuscripts. Which, if you ask me, is utterly charming.
All libraries, in my estimation, should have bats.

When I worked part-time at a second hand bookstore years ago we may have had bats in the building, but we definitely did have bums in the stacks. Which were not nearly so useful.

Of course, that was in the day and age when there also ashtrays on the premises, because the expectation was that for every book you actually bought, obsessively, you would likely read most of around a dozen more. And why do I have a gardening manual in Chinese for literati in Suzhou originally published during the Manchu dynasty, reprinted during the early nineties after China re-opened up? I would have to evict peasants and look up what those plant names actually are in English for it to be useful. Unless I simply assume that everything is pine (松 'chung'), cypress (柏 'paak'), bamboo (竹 'juk'), and chrysanthemum (菊 'guk').

松、柏、竹、菊花。

This city would indeed be more beautiful if there were more of those, and fewer peasants, techno yuppies, or bums. We must also have more bat-inhabited mediaeval libraries!

And particularly bats like the common pipstrelle (pipistrellus pipistrellus, 伏翼蝙蝠 'fuk yik pin fuk') and ashtrays at the end of shelf rows and in bookstore basements, like City Lights used to have. Alas, pipistrelles are not native to these parts. So I'll settle for the Mexican free-tailed bat (tadarida brasiliensis, 墨西哥犬吻蝠 'mak sai go huen man fuk'). They're larger, but the most common bat in these parts, and should thrive in a nice quiet library.



This morning, at around eight thirty, when I was certain that my apartment mate had left for the day and would not return suddenly because she might have forgotten something, I shut her bedroom door, made myself another cup of coffee, and settled down with books and a pipe for a nice quiet smoke. It is silent in the room at the back of the building, no heavy machinery, or noisy peasants, techno yuppies, and bums.

A pleasant visit with Stemmen in Steen - de ontcijfering der oude schriften, by Ernst Doblhofer (translated by W. van Lakwijk). Ably assisted by aged Red Virginia.
Which functions like bats to keep the bugs away.



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