Laudator Temporis Acti

Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914-2003), The Wartime Journals (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), pp. 165-166 (June 1943):

'And books', I asked myself as I stood in Blackwell’s shop in Oxford one day, surrounded by fat volumes on Soviet Russia and the Virgin Birth, and thin volumes on Education and Democracy, earnest pamphlets, flimsy novels, yellow manuals, reprints, Americana and all. There seemed no end of them. And what is in them all? Learned sawdust — vapour trash. And there were historical works too, lives of saints, and lives of kings, and lives of conquerors and politicians and administrators, and chronicles of wars and politics and movements and revolutions, — all the accumulated mundungus of all the centuries of man, stirred this way, stirred that, and smelling now thus, now thus, as the stirrer stirred. Must I add to these? I asked myself; spend perhaps a whole lifetime to increase this great Sargasso Sea by one wisp of seaweed? Vanitas Vanitatum! And over & around me, in the hidden background, in the Bodleian, in the New Bodleian, in the Radcliffe, I was aware of the unseen, oppressive, brooding presence of myriads of musty tomes, hundreds of tons of them weighing me down with their stifling, persecuting bulk. A feeling of hot spiritual claustrophobia overcame me, as in childhood, when I was besieged by a great herd of panting cows; and I turned and left the shop in disgust.