“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag
From that moment long ago when our species discovered we had trouble remembering what we had seen, heard, felt and thought, the need to take notes was born and the library became inevitable. These recordings may have begun as markings on cave walls or soaring oral histories passed down by tribal elders, but we are driven to capture it all, and in doing so provide a path for others to follow; or avoid.
I have a neighbor who has made it known of his dislike of the very idea of a public library, I guess because it smacks of some form of socialism in his mind and must therefore be inherently anti-market. I pointed out that he could go to the public library and *read* about socialism and other forms of government, or about capitalism and other economic systems. It is all so very interesting, I said. That argument did not seem to go over all that well but I promise I don’t have a smarmy bone in my body. I note in passing that “Smarmy Bones” would be a great name for a rock band.
I used to take the kids to the library every weekend, and while I perused the magazine racks they would be immersed in desperate dragons, far fables and great deeds.
“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline
Our digital life gives us access to endless new possibilities and problems. On the one hand all the knowledge of the world becomes available to us; but on the other hand we communicate in 280 character twitter-blocks, enough begin a story but not enough to complete one. I have seen these long, continued twitter-fragments; an attempt to overcome the limitations of the medium whilst tricking our forever shrinking attention spans to hang in there for the next tweet.
As wonderful and scary as the Internet is, the public library remains, to me, one of the high points of human achievement. Within the walls and amongst the cloistered stacks we call to one another across time and space. We share the common stories of our lives. The books here are meant to be checked out and read into the wee hours. I just couldn’t put it down, we say, and I never wanted it to end.
whoisfenton 