A Hymn to the Library

— Here’s a place to really “work wireless” —

I tote no slim, foldable device of silicon, plastic and liquid crystal. My shoulder bag contains only books, notepads, and a manila folder fat with the rumpled typewritten pages of my manuscript.

For the next several hours I will sit alone with these pages, with my thoughts, with my pen and my paper, silent and focused. Gadgets cannot demand my attention. The telephone sits in its cradle at home, miles away. Instead of a screen, I will stare into myself. My characters are within, awaiting my tap on their shoulders. They wait in the realm of my best thoughts, my truest feelings.

I pass through an atrium warm and crystalline, lit naturally from the glass panels at the ceiling. I turn beneath a gothic arch and my shoes whisper on durable carpet. Solid maple desks file by to right and left, partitioned for study and furnished with matching maple chairs. Few are occupied on this summer day (this is a university library). Old burnished wood glows amber under green-shaded lamps.

The ceilings are lofty and gabled. I install myself at a desk and tilt back my head. The empty space soaring over the bookstacks seems to hum with hundreds of meditations: the prior thoughts of strangers, of earlier students, of other writers, of the cumulative human labor of mind and soul to which the neatly catalogued books shelved spine-out are silent testimony.

Libraries count among the last of our public spaces dedicated to the cultivation of privacy. In the best libraries you’re expected to hush. You’re expected to glide amid the stacks, light and noiseless as a ghost, a bit lost in fantasy, primed for inspiration.

And as institution the library is a secular temple dedicated no less to the maturation of the soul—the silent, hopeful soul as it swims amid the most worthy and enduring of what is human.

This maturation and privacy go hand in hand. Today, laptops are welcome in libraries, even accommodated with free wireless service. And yet the laptop seems (doesn’t it?) somehow profane here, a bit sham, or impermanent, somewhat too … plasticky. It is, in the end, a mediating device, after all.

Meanwhile, the library’s fertile atmosphere works to return you to the wireless state. The close, soft, book-scented air shares the rich and healthy mustiness of a garden. It’s an air meant to conjure awe at everything the fertile mind of man and woman has produced—in the humanities, the arts, the sciences. Here you’re reminded of the most meaningful, time-tested method of social networking. You remember the countless, single, solitary souls who have sat alone in rooms through the ages, nurturing ideas, imaginings, dreams.

Finally, the library expects you, eventually, to hunker down in the glow of a green-shaded desklamp, to turn pages and take notes, to tend your thoughts and wade toward understanding, empathy, expansion of self. Visiting a library means remembering what it’s like to be human, to have a single inimitable soul among souls; it’s a way to reawaken one’s capacity for individuation, to realize one’s potential.

Here I am. The light is good, the silence is rich, and I’m ready to work.

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“Presenting…the Intravidual”

“Is the Internet Dangerous?”

“One Way to Protect Your Soul in A Wired Age”

“In Praise of Physical Spaces”