Of libraries I’m a devoted fan. Ever since I was seven years old libraries have been the tits upon which my mind has suckled voraciously for information. Libraries were the original Internet where you could find almost anything, offering liberation from the conventional attitudes and ideas of your own time and place.
Like many children I was often lonely as a boy, and found solace in visiting my library to share the fantasies of those who had lived before me—who found in the visions that words can create new possibilities I could never have dreamed of by myself. I loved the stories that taught me far more than my parents did about how people felt and acted toward each other, sometimes giving meaning to what frightened me about my family.
But it wasn’t until I went to college that I really began to understand everything that libraries could do. I remember sitting in the library at Amherst College staring vacantly at nothing, unable for three hours to find the information I was seeking. I was writing an honors dissertation on the relationship between Metaphysical poetry and Baroque music, contemporary to each other. I needed one more powerful connection between these art forms. My eyes happened to settle on another student down my table, who looked as discouraged as I felt. He suddenly threw his arms up in the air expressing the endless hopelessness of our efforts.
The metaphor, ‘endless’ stuck in my mind, and became ‘continuous’ – and suddenly I had what I was looking for! ‘Continuous Expansion’! Both the poetry and the music of that time had this quality of an endless discourse with God or a lover, coming from and expressing a deep faith in the underlying certainty of the order God and His love had put into the structure of everything. Bach’s music perfectly expresses a grateful and devoted adoration of connection with the bearing forces of the universe, implying faith in an unending process that could be entirely relied upon – yet also expressing human love as a force augmenting God’s good works. In John Donne’s poetry it’s often unclear whether he’s expressing adoration to God or to a human lover, implying the one is synonymous with and completely supportive of the other. This was a time when the old medieval faith, expressed as obedient love of God, and the progress of renaissance rebellion and the love of humanity were perfectly in balance. The one had not yet abandoned the other.
In the faith implied in the metaphor of ‘continuous expansion’ I had the central theme of my dissertation. What’s more I had the key to libraries. Libraries are a place for the continuous expansion of ideas and possibilities. I found the patterns of connectivity were endless from one idea or publication to the next, encouraging me to imagine knowledge as one great pool of information that tried to tell the story of life and reality. The possibility that reading could reach so far was deeply inspiring to me.
It was the continuous chain of understanding that libraries taught me existed that has been the secret to my whole psychic life, encouraging me to imagine myself capable of the kind of holistic thinking required to create a Utopian vision – the core of my first published novel, Troubadour, followed by Ambiguity, a romantic thriller, and then Metamorphosis, a collection of three stories about children growing up.
Beside my Amherst Library crucial moment of discernment, my favorite library story happened to my son. I rescued him from mediocrity – he was getting Cs and Ds in public Junior High – by sending him to a private college-preparatory high school, where he both seriously floundered, but also began to get curious about the possibilities all the bright kids he was now surrounded by seemed to believe in.
The moment of truth came while he was getting a D from his History professor his second year. History was his favorite subject. To redeem his self esteem from this damning grade, he struggled to write an original final paper.
At that moment all my annoying remarks about the secrets of libraries finally clicked for him. He cut school and headed for the University of California at Berkeley library where he remained cloistered for three days.
When he came out he had some incredibly good original ideas, which unfortunately were not well expressed, though they did bring his grade up to a C. But more important there was no looking back. He had discovered the secret of libraries. Eventually he graduated summa cum laude in History from Bates College in Maine.