THE PUBLIC LIBRARY: RIP
How the decline of a venerable institution hurts us all
“A library implies an act of faith.”
-Victor Hugo
Several years ago, while writing in a cubicle in my small-town public library, a child began shouting in the distance. One yell, then a few seconds later another; then another. I looked around the quaint, airy second floor sanctuary and saw no reaction from my four neighbors. Half-way across the huge, long room, a mother and her ‘mentally challenged’ twelve year old son were involved in a session with a man. Yet the child yelped in response to their promptings: “get me outta here”, he seemed to be saying.
Annoyed but polite, I gestured to the mother to keep it down and she ignored me. After thirty seconds of more convulsions, I shouted back, demanding that they respect those of us who were working. Furious, the tall, stocky dynamo leaped up and marched toward me. “I hope you’re not planning to hit me”, I said. “No, I’m not going to hit you”, she reassured me, before stopping just short of my nose.
You see, her child was autistic, which entitled her to conduct a ‘prompting’ session in the one public place that requests silence. Undaunted, I reminded her that the library was no place for such activity, and that an autism foundation might know of a better one. Insulted, she did what many hyped-up dullards do today; she changed the subject. A dispute over excessive noise became a referendum on autism. When I didn’t take the bait, her face creased for Act II. Fortunately, one of the timid, corpulent librarians decided to intervene.
In true contemporary fashion, she measured out blame in coffee spoons. Yes, I was right, the mother must conclude her session. But I was wrong for not coming to her first, despite the fact that her desk was less than ten feet away from the yelling. My victory, if you could call it that, still left me irked, for not one of the other patrons met my eye or nodded or even thanked me for protecting the silence for them. But the real source of my angst was that this scene was number seven this year. And there were still four months to go.
Last year, I lost a similar battle in the town’s university library. Though open to the public, the deck was stacked in favor of noisy, disrespectful students. After five years of putting out fires (some worse than others), I found myself during Spring finals in a nasty exchange with three minority students. To be fair, the previous Spring, I’d been in a vulgar quarrel with two white girls who were about to graduate, and chose the library to chew over their ‘interiority’.
But this latest exchange was different for many reasons. “You too old to be in the library”, the African-American T-shirt scholar shot at me when I complained about their playing music. The plump Black girl across from him, a Shonda Rhimes meets Gayle King, got testy: “I don’t like your tone”, she snapped, ignoring the fact that I was older than her parents. As we went back and forth, I was more disappointed that the other students, like the older public library patrons, had no language or strategy to silence their own classmates. I soon found out why. Behind my back, the flame-throwing minorities complained to library officials, and I was pressured to leave, without so much as a conversation.
This slip down the proverbial slope was a long time in coming, for the library, being ostensibly for the literate, was always a dicey proposition. When Benjamin Franklin started the first public library in America, he knew that the average stable-mate or blacksmith preferred the pub to the couplets of Alexander Pope. This is one reason why the library is an act of faith: by adding trade books to the wealth of religious and literary ones, it was thought that practical ambition might be tempted to read philosophy, literature, history and such. In the eighteenth century, anyone calling themselves cultivated (rich or poor) had to have read their Bunyan, Milton, and Shakespeare.
But in the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution transformed the practical mind into a technical one. Suddenly, there was a need for engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers and finance people. Tradition, as the philosopher George Santayana pointed out, became divorced from practice. Literature no longer informed the educated mind in its daily activities. Like religion, it came to exist as an ornament, a backyard stream feeding and guiding material progress. This transformed the public library from a cathedral of reading, research and contemplation into a refuge for restless students, eager professionals, and alienated scholars.
Following rudeness and illiteracy, the third nail in the public library’s coffin was the Pandemic of 2020-21. When American health officials deemed libraries a non-essential institution and ordered them to remain closed (while profit-making establishments could remain open), they were merely confirming their paltry understanding of what the literary world can provide. Essential, they claimed, meant only the basics: food, household items and supplies, electricity. Nothing related to the leisure time that was multiplying and swallowing us. By our consent, a frappuccino ended up being more important than an encyclopedia. Of course, many will say that the latter can be found online. If so, then how explain the failure of online teaching and the rush to get back into the classroom?
Indeed, life in quarantine exposed just how warped our spiritual values have become. With no trips and vacations to save us from ourselves; with no parties, religious services and other gatherings to comfort us; and with no school to shield parents from their children, our mania for convenience left us not knowing which objects could actually set us free. Netflix, You-Tube, video games, and social media could only toss our collective salad. This is partly because language itself, now parsed to fit a standardized corporate correctness, has not the vocabulary to fill out what people call “civil discourse”. Shrunken and skittish, our market-driven individualism, like those of birds and beavers, can only dig and bite into grimy surfaces.
But to be truly set free, humans need more. They need books and a quiet place to read them.