What do I conclude from my friendship with Henry Wotton (knight) and his ‘Elements of Architecture’, as initiated by the FWAOB-team?
It has made me realise, more than ever before, the uniqueness and rarity of an item. Why couldn’t have I received, as potential friend, a book that I could have found in any of Zurich’s usually well-stocked libraries? Why did I have to make do with one that was only available in far away Einsiedeln? In the end, this frustrating constellation led, irritatingly, to a relationship with a specific individual item, with unique inscriptions, stains and traces of wear. Irritating, because it does not conform with the promises of abstraction and electronic reduction of information of this most technical of institutions in Switzerland. Instead, we were referred to an individual object. But lo and behold, as soon as one thought to be safe with his individual copy tucked in the (electronic) folders of the personal computer, came the next daunting intervention. Now we were told, that our own book could specivically be paired with 4 or 5 other books – and that we had to establish the similarities of these books. For someone coming from a historical discipline, with its emphasis on researching contextualisation, this is playful approach that instead precludes a context, is a provocation. It is an interesting exercise, insofar as it obviously transcends the boundaries of the historical and philological disciplines of the humanities. In what relationship could 5 randomly chosen books be? Maybe the concept of friendship could be used to describe also this relationship. It is not fully explicable, its basis seems contingent, but it also appears to obey a certain logic. Maybe the most interesitng find of this induced friendship is that order – a result of science or of aesthetics – bears more mysteries than one expects.