An Ode to the Public Library
In a society where the adage "Nothing is free," rings annoyingly true on a daily basis, there is one last refuge, one last Alhambra, of the champions of penny-pinching. The public library.
Arguably the last place around that is not looking to hold you upside down and shake the lunch money out of your pockets like a grade school bully (a typo nearly left that as grad school bully, but I think we just call those student loans). Public libraries are havens for those looking to escape from the capitalistic monotony of day-to-day life.
When you walk into your local public library, you are not expected to pay some exorbitant "entrance fee," some poor bar and club excuse to milk you for a few dollars before you're obligated to buy watered down drinks for girls with room temperature IQs under the blast beats of trap remixes of Ed Sheeran (you can tell how much I cherish going to clubs). Once you are there, there is nothing for you to spend your money on. It is all assumed to be free. And not just free, but free without a catch. Checking out a book from the library doesn't require a three hour timeshare lecture to bring home your treasure. If you're like me and know that left alone in a used bookstore you'll accumulate a mass of pulped paper, whose stacks will rise around your house left untouched for years until some spontaneous catalyst forces you to pick one up, then save yourself the money and the space and take out a book from the library.
Entering a library is like entering a silent soundscape. Walking through those doors, from the buzz and inanity of life outside, into peaceful quiet regularly brings a tear to my eye (at which point I'm asked to leave the library because I'm bawling like a preteen who finished The Notebook for the first time). You are greeted by the aroma of ink and paper, a cathartic odor that elicits Proustian memories of childhood book fairs and coloring books in the doctor's office waiting room. The elderly matrons of the library (for where is there a library not staffed by darling old ladies?) greet you with quiet glances over their bifocals while you begin a journey through every era come and gone.
The rows of the library are chockful with stories, tales, and fables by men and women of every creed, color, and conviction.
Long shelves of philosophical pieces allow you to enlighten yourself with the ancient queries of Socrates, Lao Tzu, and Marcus Aurelius, the incestual and controversial imaginings of Freud (a man who claimed that "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar..."), or the more recent logics of Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky.
The fiction of writers from decades and centuries long ago pulls you into adventures you could never afford or would dare to embark on, to places and times only found in the imaginations of men more creative than yourself, and to hear stories that will challenge your opinion on the human condition (I will continue to use that phrase because it is so generally applicable and makes me sound like I have a sense of what I'm actually saying). Pulling apart the pages of John Steinbeck's classics take you into the dusty plains of Oklahoma where your eyes and lungs are stung by the smoke of hand-rolled bull tobacco cigarettes and the cheap fuel burned by beat-up jalopies; where you join an Exodus to the promised Eden of California, fueled only by the hopes and dreams of twangy-voiced farmers. You step into aristocratic French balls, told through the prose of Flaubert and Voltaire, where gentlemen and ladies in powdered wigs gossip and create the drama that will influence the Real Housewives of Orange County. Sabatini's swarthy sailors and pirates invite you to sail the warm sapphire seas of the Caribbean and Spanish Main; the smells of cannon powder and spiced rum fill your nose on board those mammoth timber whales.
But perhaps you prefer reality. You prefer to learn how to cook exotic foods your Ohioan mother never taught you to cook, to learn foreign languages to hit on that cute girl in class of ambiguous ethnic background, to learn about the lives of famous actors and actresses, to learn siege tactics that you'll imagine using on glass buildings on Wall Street. All these things can be learned in the library. A stroll through the shelves of tomes plastered in stickers with the digits of the ever efficient Dewey Decimal system drive your focus to books of math, of science, of religion, of art, of every subject you could conjure up in that smooth grey matter you call a consciousness.
Books are not all the library offers you, not the only gift is happily bestows upon you and your empty wallet. Computers, a technology taken for granted too often, may only be openly available here at the library for the homeless and destitute, for the children of single parents unable to afford such luxuries, for the technologically illiterate elderly (you will inevitably see at least one old guy indulging in less than savory adult cinematography out in public). There are community meetings held to discuss the upcoming elections, to read books together (how we crave a group mentality to push through those New York Times best selling, Oprah-recommended novels with the philosophical depth of a rain puddle), to fumble over each other speaking languages we're barely adept at. Public libraries are a home for those without one.
So quit bitching about your taxes going to stave off the creeping powers that be who intend to turn your public library into just another profit. Go down there and take out a book and learn something about yourself, about the world, about the 8 billion other people existing all around you.
As the saying goes, "Having fun isn't hard, when you've got your library card."
Arguably the last place around that is not looking to hold you upside down and shake the lunch money out of your pockets like a grade school bully (a typo nearly left that as grad school bully, but I think we just call those student loans). Public libraries are havens for those looking to escape from the capitalistic monotony of day-to-day life.
When you walk into your local public library, you are not expected to pay some exorbitant "entrance fee," some poor bar and club excuse to milk you for a few dollars before you're obligated to buy watered down drinks for girls with room temperature IQs under the blast beats of trap remixes of Ed Sheeran (you can tell how much I cherish going to clubs). Once you are there, there is nothing for you to spend your money on. It is all assumed to be free. And not just free, but free without a catch. Checking out a book from the library doesn't require a three hour timeshare lecture to bring home your treasure. If you're like me and know that left alone in a used bookstore you'll accumulate a mass of pulped paper, whose stacks will rise around your house left untouched for years until some spontaneous catalyst forces you to pick one up, then save yourself the money and the space and take out a book from the library.
Entering a library is like entering a silent soundscape. Walking through those doors, from the buzz and inanity of life outside, into peaceful quiet regularly brings a tear to my eye (at which point I'm asked to leave the library because I'm bawling like a preteen who finished The Notebook for the first time). You are greeted by the aroma of ink and paper, a cathartic odor that elicits Proustian memories of childhood book fairs and coloring books in the doctor's office waiting room. The elderly matrons of the library (for where is there a library not staffed by darling old ladies?) greet you with quiet glances over their bifocals while you begin a journey through every era come and gone.
The rows of the library are chockful with stories, tales, and fables by men and women of every creed, color, and conviction.
Long shelves of philosophical pieces allow you to enlighten yourself with the ancient queries of Socrates, Lao Tzu, and Marcus Aurelius, the incestual and controversial imaginings of Freud (a man who claimed that "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar..."), or the more recent logics of Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky.
The fiction of writers from decades and centuries long ago pulls you into adventures you could never afford or would dare to embark on, to places and times only found in the imaginations of men more creative than yourself, and to hear stories that will challenge your opinion on the human condition (I will continue to use that phrase because it is so generally applicable and makes me sound like I have a sense of what I'm actually saying). Pulling apart the pages of John Steinbeck's classics take you into the dusty plains of Oklahoma where your eyes and lungs are stung by the smoke of hand-rolled bull tobacco cigarettes and the cheap fuel burned by beat-up jalopies; where you join an Exodus to the promised Eden of California, fueled only by the hopes and dreams of twangy-voiced farmers. You step into aristocratic French balls, told through the prose of Flaubert and Voltaire, where gentlemen and ladies in powdered wigs gossip and create the drama that will influence the Real Housewives of Orange County. Sabatini's swarthy sailors and pirates invite you to sail the warm sapphire seas of the Caribbean and Spanish Main; the smells of cannon powder and spiced rum fill your nose on board those mammoth timber whales.
But perhaps you prefer reality. You prefer to learn how to cook exotic foods your Ohioan mother never taught you to cook, to learn foreign languages to hit on that cute girl in class of ambiguous ethnic background, to learn about the lives of famous actors and actresses, to learn siege tactics that you'll imagine using on glass buildings on Wall Street. All these things can be learned in the library. A stroll through the shelves of tomes plastered in stickers with the digits of the ever efficient Dewey Decimal system drive your focus to books of math, of science, of religion, of art, of every subject you could conjure up in that smooth grey matter you call a consciousness.
Books are not all the library offers you, not the only gift is happily bestows upon you and your empty wallet. Computers, a technology taken for granted too often, may only be openly available here at the library for the homeless and destitute, for the children of single parents unable to afford such luxuries, for the technologically illiterate elderly (you will inevitably see at least one old guy indulging in less than savory adult cinematography out in public). There are community meetings held to discuss the upcoming elections, to read books together (how we crave a group mentality to push through those New York Times best selling, Oprah-recommended novels with the philosophical depth of a rain puddle), to fumble over each other speaking languages we're barely adept at. Public libraries are a home for those without one.
So quit bitching about your taxes going to stave off the creeping powers that be who intend to turn your public library into just another profit. Go down there and take out a book and learn something about yourself, about the world, about the 8 billion other people existing all around you.
As the saying goes, "Having fun isn't hard, when you've got your library card."
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