I’ve always been an enthusiastic user of the public library. Every time I visit a library, if I let myself wander the shelves even a little, I come out with a pile of books, no matter how many books I’m already reading or planning to read next. I borrow at least a hundred books a year, mostly through the genius hold system. I visit the online library catalog multiple times a week. I have my library card number memorized. My library account includes a large list of books to borrow one day.
But I don’t often physically go to the library. We do live a mere two blocks away from Hamilton’s Central Library, a large open modern space with lots of concrete and glass and white glossy surfaces. The Library Book by Susan Orlean made me appreciate the library beyond a collection of books, beyond its online catalog and marvellously efficient holds system, and as a community institution and social good.
The Library Book as a library book.
The book is primarily about a devastating fire at the Los Angeles Public Library in 1986, but it’s really about so much more. The whole book is a treat to read, but here are a couple of my favourite passages.
She describes the impetus for writing the book, and how she wrote the book in part as a way to get closer to her mother, who had dementia:
“Right before learning about the library fire, I had decided I was done with writing books. Working on them felt like a slow-motion wrestling match, and I wasn’t in the mood to grapple with such a big commitment again. But here I was. I knew part of what hooked me had been the shock of familiarity I felt when I took my son to our local library — the way it telegraphed my childhood, my relationship to my parents, my love of books. It brought me close, in my musings, to my mother, and to our sojourns to the library. It was wonderful and it was bittersweet, because just as I was rediscovering those memories, my mother was losing all of hers. … Each time I visited, she receded a little more — she became vague, absent, isolated in her thoughts or maybe in some pillowy blankness that filled in where the memories had been chipped away — and I knew that now I was carrying the remembrance for both of us. … The reason why I finally embraced this book project — wanted, and then needed, to write it — was my realization that I was losing her. I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it. Is the circuit broken, the memory darkened? My mother was the one person besides me who knew what those gauzy afternoons had been like. I knew I was writing this because I was trying hard to preserve those afternoons. I convinced myself that committing them to a page meant the memory was saved, somehow, from the corrosive effect of time.”
She explains how writing a book is a form of protection against the fear of being forgotten:
“The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten — that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. … But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected it subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose — a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.”
There’s a passage about the expression used in Senegal for death: his or her library has burned. Like our brains and bodies and memories and consciousness is a library, and when we die it’s all gone, but that books are one way for those stories to have their own lives.
The Library Book ends on a beautiful note:
“I went to the library late one day, just before closing time, when the light outside was already dusky and the place was sleepy and slow. Central Library and the Bradley Wing are so big that when the crowds thin out, the library can feel very private, almost like a secret place, and the space is so enveloping that you have no sense of the world outside. … The silence was more soothing than solemn. A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone. The library is a whispering post. You don’t need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage — the writer’s belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past and to what is still to come. … I thought about my mother, who died when I was halfway done with this book, and I knew how pleased she would have been to see me in the library, and I was able to use that thought to transport myself for a split second to a time when I was young and she was in the moment, alert and tender, with years ahead of her, and she was beaming at me as I toddled to the checkout counter with an armload of books. … I looked around the room at the few people scattered here and there. Some were leaning into books, and a few were just resting, having a private moment in a public place, and I felt buoyed by being here. This is why I wanted to write this book, to tell about a place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine, and how that feels marvellous and exceptional. All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.”
For more library goodness, check out Robert Dawson’s The Public Library: A Photographic Essay and his photo galleries of American and global public libraries. And I’ll leave you with a poem: “Don’t Go Into the Library” by Alberto Rios.
“The library is dangerous, full
Of answers. If you go inside,
You may not come out
The same person who went in.”