[THS] Charles Simic: A Country Without Libraries

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A Country Without Libraries 

Charles Simic


http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/may/18/country-without-libraries/

  Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside
  of a dog, it's too dark to read.  - Groucho Marx

All across the United States, large and small cities are
closing public libraries or curtailing their hours of
operations. Detroit, I read a few days ago, may close all of
its branches and Denver half of its own: decisions that will
undoubtedly put hundreds of its employees out of work. When
you count the families all over this country who don't have
computers or can't afford Internet connections and rely on
the ones in libraries to look for jobs, the consequences
will be even more dire. People everywhere are unhappy about
these closings, and so are mayors making the hard decisions.
But with roads and streets left in disrepair, teachers,
policemen and firemen being laid off, and politicians in
both parties pledging never to raise taxes, no matter what
happens to our quality of life, the outlook is bleak. "The
greatest nation on earth," as we still call ourselves, no
longer has the political will to arrest its visible and
precipitous decline and save the institutions on which the
workings of our democracy depend.

I don't know of anything more disheartening than the sight
of a shut down library. No matter how modest its building or
its holdings, in many parts of this country a municipal
library is often the only place where books in large number
on every imaginable subject can be found, where both
grownups and children are welcome to sit and read in peace,
free of whatever distractions and aggravations await them
outside. Like many other Americans of my generation, I owe
much of my knowledge to thousands of books I withdrew from
public libraries over a lifetime. I remember the sense of
awe I felt as a teenager when I realized I could roam among
the shelves, take down any book I wanted, examine it at my
leisure at one of the library tables, and if it struck my
fancy, bring it home. Not just some thriller or serious
novel, but also big art books and recordings of everything
from jazz to operas and symphonies.

In Oak Park, Illinois, when I was in high school, I went to
the library two or three times a week, though in my classes
I was a middling student. Even in wintertime, I'd walk the
dozen blocks to the library, often in rain or snow, carrying
a load of books and records to return, trembling with
excitement and anticipation at all the tantalizing books
that awaited me there. The kindness of the librarians, who,
of course, all knew me well, was also an inducement. They
were happy to see me read so many books, though I'm sure
they must have wondered in private about my vast and
mystifying range of interests.

I'd check out at the same time, for instance, a learned book
about North American insects and bugs, a Louis-Ferdinand
Céline novel, the poems of Hart Crane, an anthology of
American short stories, a book about astronomy and
recordings by Bix Beiderbecke and Sidney Bechet. I still
can't get over the generosity of the taxpayers of Oak Park.
It's not that I started out life being interested in
everything; it was spending time in my local,
extraordinarily well-stacked public library that made me so.

This was just the start. Over the years I thoroughly
explored many libraries, big and small, discovering numerous
writers and individual books I never knew existed, a number
of them completely unknown, forgotten, and still very much
worth reading. No class I attended at the university could
ever match that. Even libraries in overseas army bases and
in small, impoverished factory towns in New England had
their treasures, like long-out of print works of avant-garde
literature and hard-boiled detective stories of near-genius.

Wherever I found a library, I immediately felt at home.
Empty or full, it pleased me just as much. A boy and a girl
doing their homework and flirting; an old woman in obvious
need of a pair of glasses squinting at a dog-eared issue of
The New Yorker; a prematurely gray-haired man writing
furiously on a yellow pad surrounded by pages of notes and
several open books with some kind of graphs in them; and,
the oddest among the lot, a balding elderly man in an
elegant blue pinstripe suit with a carefully tied red bow
tie, holding up and perusing a slim, antique-looking volume
with black covers that could have been poetry, a religious
tract, or something having to do with the occult. It's the
certainty that such mysteries lie in wait beyond its doors
that still draws me to every library I come across.

I heard some politician say recently that closing libraries
is no big deal, since the kids now have the Internet to do
their reading and school work. It's not the same thing. As
any teacher who recalls the time when students still went to
libraries and read books could tell him, study and
reflection come more naturally to someone bent over a book.
Seeing others, too, absorbed in their reading, holding up or
pressing down on different-looking books, some intimidating
in their appearance, others inviting, makes one a
participant in one of the oldest and most noble human
activities. Yes, reading books is a slow, time-consuming,
and often tedious process. In comparison, surfing the
Internet is a quick, distracting activity in which one
searches for a specific subject, finds it, and then reads
about it - often by skipping a great deal of material and
absorbing only pertinent fragments. Books require patience,
sustained attention to what is on the page, and frequent
rest periods for reverie, so that the meaning of what we are
reading settles in and makes its full impact.

How many book lovers among the young has the Internet
produced? Far fewer, I suspect, than the millions libraries
have turned out over the last hundred years. Their slow
disappearance is a tragedy, not just for those impoverished
towns and cities, but for everyone everywhere terrified at
the thought of a country without libraries.

[Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. He has
published twenty collections of his own poetry, five books
of essays, a memoir, and numerous books of translations. He
has received many literary awards for his poems and his
translations, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin
Prize, and the MacArthur Fellowship. Voice at 3 A.M., his
selected later and new poems, was published in 2003 and a
new book of poems, My Noiseless Entourage, came out in the
spring of 2005. His new e-book is titled Confessions of a
Poet Laureate.]