Still the Scales Balance

The author, Roald Dahl, is known for his wacky and wonderful characters, his impossible (but deliciously charming) scenarios. In his book, Matilda, an unbelievably intellectually advanced child is denied the pleasure of having a book of her own. Matilda discovers, however, that she can sit and read for hours on end in the library, even without a library card. At only four years of age, she walks herself to the library every weekday and soon reads through the entire children's collection. Having exhausted everything in the children's section, she moves on to the adult fiction: Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Tess of D'Urbervilles, Gone to Earth... She reads on and on, encouraged and aided by her kindly librarian, Mrs. Phelps. Like most of what Dahl writes, it is scrumptious and improbable, utterly ridiculous, and so, so good.

I read Matilda years ago and, fantastical as it seems for a child to read through the entire children's collection, it turns out that this phenomenon is not wholly relegated to the land of fiction. He may not have been quite so young as she (a full twice her age), but the author, Neil Gaiman, did nearly the same thing as a boy:

"I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children’s library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the children’s’ library I began on the adult books.

They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader – nothing less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old."

- Neil Gaiman, 2013

The late author, Richard Wagamese, had a similar introduction to libraries, though he was older still: double again. Richard was a homeless sixteen-year-old when he first walked into that humble library in St. Catharines, Ontario. It was (quite literally) a cold and rainy day and Richard had found his way inside out of the chill, just following the groups of people he saw walking in. This seemingly inconsequential act would change his life forever.

What struck him, first of all, was the wonderful quiet:

"At that time in my life, quiet had no place for me. All I had grown used to was banging and crashing and breaking and slapping and hitting and yelling and the library was an entirely different world…"

- Richard Wagamese, 2016

Ah, yes: the quiet and peaceful library of old. Let's stop right there for a moment. Even as a major lover of quiet, I have (admittedly) run my fair share of loud and boisterous children's programming (of the ilk that has become so typical of the 21st century library). I have seen the joy on small faces as music is played and stories are told and dances are danced. In many ways, I do love the fun and the energy that is to be found in the modern library. Still, hearing about Richard's experience with the quiet of libraries gives me renewed pause. It was roughly 50 years ago (in the early 1970s) when Richard walked into that St. Catharines library, but the need for quiet is no less profound today. If anything, the need is greater than it was 50 years ago. I am reminded of a thought-provoking article called Bring Back Shushing Librarians that I read a few years back:

"I can see why someone who works in a hushed library might prefer to see it become as lively as a café, street corner, park bench or the Apple Store, but we already have those places to go to when we want to sit and visit or to congregate around a screen. Where will we go when we need some peace?

For rich people, that's not a problem. They live in spacious homes, glide along in hermetically sealed cars, book weekends in restful spas, dine in restaurants where the nearest table is 6 feet away. Quiet is one of the sweetest luxuries they're able to afford. ...refuge from this cacophonous world is getting harder and harder to come by. Let's hope librarians are listening to all the patrons asking them not to take it away."

- Laura Miller, 2013

Framed in terms of economic advantage, the context of Richard's experience casts the whole matter into even sharper relief. He was well on his way to being about as downtrodden as a person can become: a cold and friendless sixteen-year-old living on the streets. The surprise and relief that Richard felt upon finding a genuinely quiet space (at long last) just melts my heart.

Finally, quiet.

Finally, a gentle solace from the clanging, banging world he had been trapped in.

According to the Pew Research Centre, 76% of library users said that they consider quiet spaces an important element in the public library setting. To put that into perspective, having access to computers and the internet rang in at 77%, only one point higher than the need for quiet. In that case, how much of library-fare should resemble a summer-camp-sing-along-fest and how much of it should be about preserving a quiet space with no noise or distractions? It's a tough one to answer. I do think that it's possible to have both (dedicated program rooms are a huge help with this) and there are merits to "noisy" programming, but the need for quiet is very real.

One thing is for certain, and it is shared in common with Neil Gaiman's as well as Richard Wagamese's story: the library seemed to be the place where an unaccompanied eight-year-old child and a homeless teenager alike were treated with uncommon dignity and respect. Neither were belittled or looked down upon. Each was regarded like he was intrinsically valuable, like he genuinely mattered (the fact that these things happened to be true seemed to have had little impression on the interactions hitherto experienced by either boy). As Richard recalled:

"I knew then that I needed to come back and I needed to have more of that… At first, I was really shy, [but] the more that I went back and the more that I read, the more curious I got… I would ask the librarians [to help me find books] and I would read them.”

- Richard Wagamese, 2016

Because he didn’t have an address, Richard was not able to get a library card, but he was treated with kindness, respect, and open arms, spending hour upon hour in the library: reading, reading, reading. He read whatever inspired his interest: astronomy, geometry, geography, history, electromagnetic theory, literary fiction.

It was the fiction that affected him the most.

When asked why certain books or authors that he read at the time had such an impact on him, he said:

“Because I had never experienced the magic that happens when you get touched by language, when you get touched by words. I had never experienced the glow that happens inside you when you disappear into somebody else’s dream—and how that fills up all of the empty spaces in your chest and how it allows you to be lifted up and transported… free to wander in a whole different imaginary landscape… It awoke something in me.”

- Richard Wagamese, 2016

Richard Wagamese went on to write the award-winning novel, Indian Horse, which was made into a feature-length film in 2017. In his lifetime, he published 16 full-length works, no less than 6 of which received prestigious recognition for their contributions to the published word.

It all started with a library.

It all started with quiet.

The author, Deborah Feldman, was raised in an isolated culture that restricted most reading. Growing up, if she wanted to read a book, she had to make a covert trip to the library so that she could read there in secret. For a long time, she didn't have a library card and even after she got one, she still often had to do without. She couldn't risk getting caught. It was too dangerous, she later wrote. And yet, Deborah recalls how deeply enlivening and freeing those stories were for her, the ones that she was able to secretly find her way into because of the library. Those stories made her feel like someone, somewhere, understood:

"The librarians always smile when they see me, silent encouragement in their eyes.

I don’t have a library card, so I can’t take books home with me. I wish that I could, because I feel so extraordinarily happy and free when I read that I’m convinced it could make everything else in my life bearable, if only I could have books all the time.

Sometimes it feels like the authors of these books understand me, that they wrote these stories with me in mind. How else to explain the similarities between me and the characters in Roald Dahl’s tales: unfortunate, precocious children despised and neglected by their shallow families and peers?

After I read James and the Giant Peach, I dreamed of rolling away in the womb of a fruit from Bubby’s garden. It seems to me that in the literature revolving around children, children who are strange and misunderstood like me, at some point something comes along to transform their lives, to transport them to the magic netherworld to which they truly belong. And then they realize that their old life was just a mistake, that they were extraordinary all along and meant for bigger and better things.”

- Deborah Feldman, 2012

There is a pattern to these stories, isn't there? Reading opened up a world of happiness and adventure for Matilda: an antidote to the cruelty and loneliness that had been her life up until that point. For Neil Gaiman, libraries were a place of abundance, belonging, and free exploration. “Libraries are about freedom,” Neil told The Reading Agency in a 2013 lecture on the importance of reading and libraries. Richard Wagamese felt his first awakening call to be a writer in that humble St. Catharines library. Like Neil, he was not used to being treated with respect and I think that this, above all, made an enormous difference. For Deborah Feldman, a covert afternoon in the library was a sort of healing balm: a soothing salve to ease the profound isolation and loneliness that she felt. The freedom to read was not a real option for her as a child. She may have lived in a close-knit community, but somehow, she felt alone, numb, and empty.

At one point, she mused, "Could I seriously give up the security I have now simply for the sake of freedom?"

In the end, she decided yes.

"Lately, I have been spending hours sitting between the library stacks and thinking about my future. Looking at the books lining the shelves, I remember how I coveted the privilege to read as a child, how much I risked... and how the joy of reading always outweighed the fear."

- Deborah Feldman, 2012

In every case, libraries played a pivotal role in the lives of people, both real and imagined. Libraries were a turning page. Libraries were where these young individuals felt respected, transported, and truly free for the first time in their lives.

There is, actually, a very good reason for this, and it isn't merely that librarians are "nice" (although a great many are) or that reading is "fun" (although it often is). It's more than what we are able to apprehend superficially and more than what most of us probably imagine when we think about libraries. Libraries have core responsibilities to the public they serve: responsibilities that transcend even the wonderful programs, quiet spaces, and friendliness of the workers.

There is a great scene in the movie, Rise of the Guardians, where Nicholas St. North corners Jack Frost and demands to know who he really is ("What is your centre?")—I encourage you to watch the clip (it's only 2 minutes). The point is that, on the surface, libraries are very much about books. This is, traditionally, kind of our thing: stacks and stacks of hardcovers and paperbacks, book trucks, mini libraries on front lawns, that soaring cathedral of a room that the Beast uses to win Belle over in the Disney rendition of Beauty and the Beast (pro tip, by the way, if you ever fall in love with a single bibliophile). That's the outermost layer. Inside of that layer? I don't know... perhaps the rare and wonderful quiet, or perhaps all of the great programs and services that libraries provide, from baby Storytime to technology assistance to the panini press that you can borrow for your next dinner party. At a level even deeper than that, there are the caring and patient librarians: the people who treated 8-year-old Gaiman and 16-year-old Richard Wagamese ("greatly unwashed, unfed—just a mess") with such genuine care and respect. The way we treat people makes such a difference. It matters in every line of work, obviously, but very much so in libraries.

I'm sure there are more things. Libraries are a seemingly-endless nesting doll of possibilities, but before I tell you what is there at the centre, I have one more story to share.

Neil Gaiman has a great aunt who lived through the holocaust. She was sent to the ghettos during World War II where possession of a book would result (at best) in hard labour and (at worst) in death. Even with the stakes as high as they were, somebody in that ghetto risked his or her life to smuggle in a copy of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind... and Neil Gaiman's great aunt, Helen Fagin, was able to get her hands on it. She hid it behind a loose brick in the wall and read the whole thing in secret. “There are times when dreams sustain us more than facts," she later wrote, "To read a book and surrender to a story is to keep our very humanity alive.”

As she tells it:

"I conducted a clandestine school offering Jewish children a chance at the essential education denied them by their captors. But I soon came to feel that teaching these sensitive young souls Latin and mathematics was cheating them of something far more essential — what they needed wasn’t dry information but hope, the kind that comes from being transported into a dream-world of possibility.

One day, as if guessing my thoughts, one girl beseeched me: “Could you please tell us a book, please?”

For the next hour, Helen told the girls the story of Gone With the Wind—orally, from memory—as much as she could remember.

"For that magical hour, we had escaped into a world not of murder but of manners and hospitality. All the children’s faces had grown animated with new vitality.

A knock at the door shattered our shared dream-world. As the class silently exited, a pale green-eyed girl turned to me with a tearful smile: “Thank you so very much for this journey into another world. Could we please do it again, soon?”

That green-eyed girl was one of the few who survived that place, sustained during that vital, golden hour by a story. It may not have been perfectly rendered. It may have been told secondhand from a Polish translation of a book written many, many hundreds of miles away, but it was real to her in that moment. In a context where mere possession of that book could have meant the ultimate price, still, somebody decided that it was worth smuggling it in. As Neil Gaiman put it:

"It's not just escapism; it can actually be escape and it's worth dying for."

- Neil Gaiman, 2015

This brings me to what lies nestled at the very core when it comes to libraries (what is our centre?). That something is freedom. Libraries are predicated upon the (admittedly) elevated notion that freedom to information, stories, and creative expression is a fundamental human right:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

- Article 19, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

This is why librarians work so hard to find, purchase, and process a book that we might not have on our shelves or (more often) to request something through an interlibrary loan. Whatever you are searching for, be it a luxurious rainy day novel, a movie, or a weighty tome for a post-secondary research project, at it's core, it isn't frivolous. It strikes to the very heart of what libraries stand for: the freedom to access those books, movies, and expressions of human creativity in the first place.

Some of these are incredibly sad stories; Richard, Helen, and Deborah, in particular, suffered greatly in their lives. Yet somehow, a book/a story/a library was able to transcend all that. There is an undeniably common thread in these human tales of sorrow and triumph. Something as simple as being treated with dignity, relating to a character in a children's book, or being in possession of a forbidden paperback had an oddly, disproportionately positive effect: an effect that only somebody with a hearty dose of imagination could possibly have predicted.

As Jane Hirshfield wrote: