In her book Wild: An Elemental Journey, the travel writer Jay Griffiths describes a vision occasioned by her drinking the Amazonian hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca, under the guidance of shamans in Peru. She felt herself transformed into a jaguar and then, clear as day, transported back to her university town of Oxford where she prowled through the reading rooms of the Bodleian library, “roaring in anger and disgust at how my culture can know so little for knowing so much” (Griffiths 2008: 98). Her anger was triggered by the chasm she perceived between dry Western epistemology and the oppressed “wild and wet” knowledge of the rainforest. “Amazonian shamans”, she writes, “feel they are drinking knowledge when they take ayahuasca … people don't just learn about plants, they learn from certain plants called ‘plant teachers’ or doctores, which teach people medicine. This is a contradiction in terms to the Western mind – it balks at there being intelligence in anything other than humankind” (ibid.: 17).

Griffiths's story is arresting but it arouses conflicting reactions in me. As a writer and part-time university lecturer living in Oxford, I spend a good deal of my working life in the Bodleian library. I feel humbled, privileged, that I canjust wander in; that, with a few deft clicks of a mouse, I can call up, handle and read rare manuscripts, obscure texts, or expensive reference books. Indeed, that any of us can study the exact words of a long-dead Greek philosopher or medieval poet, or that you might be reading this long after I have been reshelved, seems to me one of the most remarkable achievements of Western civilization.