Leaving the St. Joe County Public Library in downtown South Bend, I feel like a child again, pushing through the heavy doors and gripping the little stack I have chosen.
I’m rediscovering the pleasures of the library again, for the first time since I was a student.
It’s taken me this long, paradoxically, because I studied literature. I love books, and I felt I needed to own the books I read. They are, after all, a kind of biography of the mind, our personal anthology of thought.
As a French teacher, I can tell you that une librairie is a bookstore and the word for library is bibliotheque—which may bring to mind a night club with stacks of dappled books, shimmering under a mirrored ball.
I kept my college books for way too long, many of them with bright yellow “used” stickers on the paperback spines. I still have some of them: literary theory, existentialism, art history textbooks—not things I am likely to reread anytime soon.
Maybe I felt I had to keep all the books I loved because I came of age before the Internet era, and if you wanted to read someone that perfect section of a Milan Kundera novel or Walt Whitman poem, you had to have the book on the shelf.
Eventually, there are not enough bookshelves. And when you keep moving across the country and the Atlantic, as I did, all those boxes of books become an albatross.
In any case, now I read mostly for pleasure. I’m not furiously annotating and underlining (another reason to own, rather than borrow, books), just savoring and letting go. There are still some classics in the piles of books around the house, but many are ephemeral diversions and not necessarily ones I would be inspired to read aloud from.
Libraries have always held fascination. When I was a kid, I thought it was pretty nifty that you could check out art from the library and hang it in your room for a while. I read a book about a pet library and dreamt about how great that would be, to bring home a rabbit or some other small furry creature.
As a photo researcher in New York, I often traipsed up the steps of the main library on 5th Avenue, between the two leonine sentinels flanking the entrance. The books had their own guardians, under those vaulting ceilings rich with panel and paint. You would bring a slip to the desk and then wait for your number to appear on the board, while a librarian went into the hidden stacks to retrieve your books.
Our St. Joe County Library has become rather grand itself, after its recent makeover. Public libraries everywhere are reinventing themselves for modern times, offering new value to communities of people with a world’s worth of information in their pockets. At our local library, I’ve been to the new auditorium for a film series on social justice and a panel discussion of women entrepreneurs; to the tech-ready classrooms for a French conversation group; and to the recording studio to sit behind a professional microphone and record a personal essay for my local public radio station. Whatever the motive, it’s always a pleasure to visit.
Public libraries are many things to many people. They are a lifeline for the most vulnerable among us. They are important “third places,” those sites besides home and work where community is built. They are our communally shared property, shrinking our carbon footprint. They are the last free zones of culture, shelter and learning.
And, since libraries offer a greater range of books on any subject than a bookstore could, they are fertile ground for unexpected treasures.
It happens like this: Arriving at the correct numbered section for the title I want, I turn my head sideways and scan the spines, finding other books on the topic more interesting than the one I was looking for. Soon I am tumbling down a rabbit hole of pet interests. And I can take more than one of them home for a while—with their splendid hardback luxury—because I don’t have to count the cost.
Music: LOST IN THE LIBRARY, Saint Etienne