BRICK BY BRICK

ALEXANDRIA AND THE DREAM OF ALL KNOWLEDGE

AURELIA VOSS

July 30, 2025

We raise libraries as monuments to absence, not abundance. Alexandria’s fire taught us that the perfect archive lives only in myth, a shadow we can neither rebuild nor surpass. Each new library is less a vessel of knowledge than a gesture of longing, an attempt to touch an imagined wholeness that was never truly there.

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On the Corniche in Alexandria, Egypt, where the Mediterranean presses against the city like an old memory, the air smells faintly of salt and diesel. The promenade curves along the water, a ribbon of cracked pavement, past cafés where the furniture looks older than the customers and hotels that still dream of a century that has already left them behind. The sea is flat, a pale green plate reflecting the harsh noon light. It is here, just off this restless road, that the Bibliotheca Alexandrina rises—glass and concrete, tilted toward the water.

The building, opened in 2002, is less a library than a performance of one. It claims eight million books, digital archives, a planetarium, and a facade carved with scripts from every known alphabet. It looks monumental, confident, almost defiant—yet the moment you walk through its vast atrium, you feel something quieter, heavier. It is not abundance that meets you, but absence. A kind of hollow echo.

A bold attempt to rebuild the memory of a city that once knew everything

The Library of Alexandria, the real one, is mostly myth now, but the myth is stronger than the ruins. We imagine it as a cathedral of learning, a place where the scrolls of every ancient civilization—Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian—were gathered and guarded. It is said that its destruction, by fire or decree or neglect, erased the memory of the ancient world. And so we tell the story again and again, as if the loss were ours, as if something deep in the marrow of our collective imagination cannot forgive it. A universal memory.

The library’s destruction—whether by Julius Caesar’s troops setting fire to the docks in 48 BCE, and the flames spreading to the library, or by the decree of the Christian patriarch Theophilus in 391 CE, or by the later Muslim conquest—has become a kind of cultural trauma, retold by generations who have never been able to confirm the details. No one can agree on when it burned, how it burned, or if it burned all at once. But the myth of its annihilation is stronger than any record we might recover.

A city where every street once pointed toward knowledge

Perhaps the library’s power lies not in what it held, but in what we imagine it held. It is the fantasy of total knowledge—everything that could be known, everything that was known—stored in one place. The tragedy is not simply that it was lost, but that it reminds us how much we will never know.

We keep building libraries, arguably to console ourselves regarding what is already lost. Alexandria burned, and in burning, it gave us the only library we could never surpass. What we chase is not knowledge but the resonance of a completeness that never existed.

We speak of the Library of Alexandria as though it were a single building, but in truth it was a network or campus: the Mouseion, the Serapeum, annexes and copy rooms, and ships that were ordered to surrender every manuscript on board so that scholars could copy them. It was less a library than a system of hoarding. And yet we see it now as a cathedral of learning, a perfect order shattered by fire. That image—a single catastrophic moment of destruction—has more power than the reality. There is no historical clarity here, and perhaps that’s the point. The library exists for us now as an idea, and a warning that what we know is always provisional, and fragile.

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges once said that he imagined paradise as a kind of library. But Borges also understood the madness of totality. In The Library of Babel (1941), he imagined a universe composed of hexagonal rooms, each filled with books containing every possible permutation of letters and words. It is a vision of infinite knowledge that collapses into chaos—most books are meaningless, gibberish, while the few containing coherent truths are indistinguishable from the rest. The result is despair, a labyrinth where meaning cannot survive.

Borges imagined infinity as a library—this is what forever looks like with bookshelves

To chase a complete library, Borges knew, was to chase a kind of madness. The same madness that draws us back to Alexandria.

Standing in the modern Bibliotheca’s cool light, I think of all the people who have tried to resurrect the dream. Napoleon, for one. In 1798, he invaded Egypt with soldiers and also an army of scholars—167 savants tasked with documenting the country like a living museum. They measured, sketched, catalogued. They saw Egypt as a puzzle that could be solved only with the right archival approach. The result, Description de l’Égypte, published between 1809 and 1829, is a twenty-three-volume monument to obsession. It is beautiful and strange, encompassing for instance images of temples and hieroglyphs drawn with the precision of an entomologist dissecting a dead insect. Napoleon imagined a universal library that would place all human knowledge under French control. His empire collapsed before the idea could take shape, but the dream lingered.

Napoleon in Egypt, discovering that history is never as dead as it looks

The next great dreamers were Belgian. Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, who both started out as lawyers, abandoned law for the fantasy of a universal archive. In 1910 they founded the Mundaneum, a project to gather all human knowledge—every book, article, image, and fact—into a single, organized system. Otlet and La Fontaine believed in the power of classification. They used index cards, millions of them, meticulously cross-referenced in drawers that filled entire warehouses. They imagined a future where anyone could request information by telegraph and receive a perfect answer. To them, knowledge was not fluid or fragmentary, but something that could be neatly arranged, like minerals in a cabinet.

There was a tragic futility to it. Information poured in faster than the clerks could categorize it. The very act of cataloguing seemed to generate more chaos. By the 1930s, they were drowning. The Nazis looted the archives, and the vision faded into obscurity. But the dream itself—that knowledge could be tamed—did not die.

In the 1930s, H. G. Wells proposed a World Brain, a global repository of information to prevent war and ignorance. The Soviet Union once tried to build a Lenin Library that would store “all knowledge for all workers,” but it became a bureaucratic nightmare of incomplete catalogs. UNESCO, in the 1950s, flirted with the idea of microfilm utopias—tiny reels that could hold the entire history of human thought. Each project failed for the same reason: the archive always outgrows the container.

Our contemporary obsession with data is not so different. Google’s claim that it could digitize every book ever written is merely Napoleon with better servers. Google Books launched in 2004 with the swagger of a company that believed it could do what Alexandria could not: collect everything. Millions of volumes were scanned, including rare and fragile manuscripts. For a brief moment, it felt as though the future of knowledge might actually be universal.

Then the lawsuits started. Authors and publishers accused Google of theft, of swallowing centuries of intellectual labor without permission. By 2015, the project had shrunk to a fraction of what was promised. Even Google, with all its algorithms, could not contain the sprawl. The failure wasn’t technical—it was philosophical. Knowledge isn’t a fixed quantity that can be scanned or indexed. It mutates. It contradicts itself. The dream of total knowledge collapses because it forgets that meaning is always context specific, always partial. We generate so much data each day now that the very notion of a “complete library” feels quaint. We do not lack information. We lack meaning. We lack the ability to stop, to choose, to hold one thread of thought without being pulled into an infinite scroll.

The modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina is an extraordinary building. And yet, the deeper you go, the more you sense its emptiness. It is not a failure of content—there are indeed millions of books—but of ambition. The building is haunted by its own premise. It cannot be what the original was imagined to be. It cannot even pretend. It is less a library than a monument to longing.

Light, wood, silence, Wi-Fi—and 2,000 years of expectations

What strikes me most about Alexandria—both the mythic one and the modern—is how much of it is built on a fear of silence. A fear of forgetting. We build libraries not because they complete us, but because they remind us of how incomplete we are. Every book we place on a shelf is a small rebellion against time.

Late in the afternoon, the Bibliotheca begins to empty. The sunlight slants through the tilted glass roof, pooling in pale gold on the wooden terraces. There is a hush that feels deeper than silence—a kind of waiting. A young student is bent over a chemistry textbook, her pencil hovering, her movements deliberate. She is alone in a room built for thousands.

Every library is a ruin in slow motion. Books age, ideas expire, systems fail. We know this, but we keep building. We build because we need to believe that knowledge can be kept alive, that it won’t vanish the moment we turn away. Perhaps that’s the true legacy of the Library of Alexandria: not the knowledge it held, but the longing it left behind. A longing so powerful that it keeps us scanning books, building archives, dreaming of impossible catalogs.

The Library of Alexandria, as imagined by centuries of wishful thinking—where history meets architectural fan fiction

As I step outside, the Mediterranean is darkening into slate. The Bibliotheca glows faintly behind me, like the ruin of something not yet built. I think of Borges’s infinite hexagons, of Otlet’s endless drawers, of Google’s humming servers—all of them chasing the same ghost.

Aurelia Voss (b. 1978 in Bern) is a researcher, essayist, and archivist of the neglected histories of knowledge. Her work maps the secret architectures of libraries, indexes, and encyclopedias—those grand, quixotic, and always incomplete attempts to impose order on the world. She studied archaeology and philosophy at the University of Vienna, where she learned that every system of knowledge is also a labyrinth, and every index a confession of what it cannot contain.

Cover image: When your “to read” pile goes up in flames