“In this place you can become the person you want to be. Anything can be gotten from books. In books there are rooms of gold, in books there is jadelike beauty.”
“Are they really that good?”
“You bet. You don’t think all those bullshitters were born that way, do you?”
Wang Shuo, Please Don’t Call Me Human
-i-
“Love was just a matter of upping the skirts and downing the britches.” For years I have felt sure that the source of these memorable words – accurately recalled within a few syllables, I assure you – was just on the tip of my tongue and would come to mind in a moment. Certainly, assuming that nothing has changed in the past fifty years in my hometown library in Iowa, I could walk you to the proper case, just out of sight of the librarian’s circulation desk, and within a few seconds we would pull down the exact volume and find the heavily thumbed page in question.
Did dear Mrs. Kibbie ever wonder about the frequent visits to this little corner of our small public library by teams of adolescent boys? Was the fulfillment of our most tempestuous fantasies really as simple, as cavalier, as this author made it seem? How to conquer the inhibitions of church and school and family that stood between us and the matter-of-fact actions suggested by the writer? Most scurrilous question of all: was Mrs. Kibbie’s blossoming daughter apprised of this magic formula for romance? And, should Mrs. Kibbie herself happen to look into these pages, how long would the book remain on the shelves?
I had already written the above words when I came upon the following passage in Alberto Manguel’s book The Library at Night wherein he recalls something of his own youthful experience of libraries:
And yet, many seemingly innocent titles deceived the librarian’s censorious eye….I remember, in the silence broken by whispered snatches of conversation, the pages at which certain books would spontaneously fall open….How these forbidden texts had found their way into our scrupulous library we never knew, and we wondered how long it would be before the librarian discovered that, under his very nose, generation after generation of corruptible students filled the absence on the shelves by selectively reading these scandalous books. (113)
What Manguel and I are describing is very nearly a rite of passage for young readers, a crucial experience in which they discover that something found inside the library may in startling moments intersect with what has perhaps not yet been found but has already been extravagantly anticipated, probably through the agency of books, outside the library. This is a turning point in the life of the young library-goer, a shift from those tall, thin children’s books, fanciful and often moral-laden picture stories, chosen under supervision and lugged home in stacks for page-turning with mom. At a certain point, fledgling readers develop that rugged independence that enables them to stumble upon the book or, more likely, the passage that disrupts by upsetting all those earlier moralizings – and the shift is apocalyptic not gradual, cataclysmic not slow and measured, for it brings into question not just the moral codes but, more intimately, the purveyers of the codes (no young reader imagines that another kid wrote any of these books). In short, it installs Multiplicity and Choice in the place where Simplicity and Obedience once stood.
The moment is clothed in the frisson of all invigilated experience, the thrill of the surreptitious discovery of that which the invigilators themselves have presumably failed to keep hidden. It’s a competition of secrecies and a lasting lesson in things not to be spoken. Thus it is that libraries, it seems, play a role in the psycho-mytho-logical unfolding of the human psyche as we learn to negotiate the rocky orphic paths between subterfuge and reticence. For certain personalities, it may be the first introduction to the excitement of intrigue, for others the beginning of a lifetime of deceit, for all something about the fallibility of authority, enriched much later in life by the ironic awareness that the authorities themselves, having gone through the same experience in their young lives, knew very well what was going on.
-ii-
Manguel has said that it is a mistake “to look upon a library as an all-encompassing but neutral space.” (108) Libraries of the sort that we call “public” and regard as “all-encompassing” are not neutral at all. On the one hand, replete with systems of control (the catalog), discipline (fines), accountability (the library card), rules (silence), and management (the librarian), they present an intimidating image of the constraints under which information is stored and disseminated and knowledge inculcated. Reinforced by their sister institution, the school, libraries have, in this regard, a permanent shaping influence on the individual and social mind. After the initial pride of possession has passed, the library card still stands as a mark of our containment. At the same time, libraries are a challenge to any individual (here, read “parent”) or social entity (church, school, government – and, oddly, libraries themselves) whose main intentions are directed towards control and stability. Those “all-encompassing” collections in their very existence proffer forms of multiplicity of thought and wildness of action that can prove to be destabilizing for everyone. For the young mind, such encounters as described earlier fuel the uncertainty (Should I be reading this?) and the rebelliousness (If not I, who, then?) and the burgeoning conviction of the hypocrisy (Why you and not I?) of the adult world. Along with this comes the dawning awareness of the vulnerability of authority itself (How did this book get to be here after all? And if there is this breakdown of vigilance, where else might one find it?). At the social level, then, the “all-encompassing” library threatens rigid and narrow forms of social control through the breadth of materials it makes available to any who choose to explore them.
-iii-
Traveling through southern Utah in the spring of 2011, I noticed an article in the Salt Lake City Tribune reporting on the disappearance of several pallets of books that had been donated to the library serving the border towns of Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, by individuals, libraries, and communities around the United States. Suspicion for the disappearance was directed at Mr. Warren Jeffs, “President and Prophet, Seer and Revelator,” whose Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS, the conservative and polygamist break-away branch of what is generally referred to as the Mormon faith) was said to have “owned and controlled nearly every aspect of the community” in the two heavily polygamist towns. It was assumed that the donated books had been destroyed since some were found burning in a pit just behind the building that was slated to become the library. However, a few days later at least some of the missing books were found in a Deseret Mormon Thrift Store in a nearby town and later reports indicated that other of the books had turned up at libraries in other, non-polygamist, towns in the area.
Returning to this incident nearly a year later, I found that this was an old and ongoing story rather than a new event. In January 2008, some three years before the current incident, the Salt Lake City Daily Herald had reported that the same two border communities were in process of rebuilding a library whose collection of books had “mysteriously disappeared years ago.” One local resident commented that “nobody’s saying what happened to all the books.” But the newspaper went on to report the widely held belief that Warren Jeffs himself had “ordered the library closed and the books destroyed.” Jeffs and his FLDS supporters maintained that it was the right of the community to control the influx of information from the “outside world.”
In his book Under the Banner of Heaven, a study of the FLDS, Jon Krakauer quotes one of Jeffs’ older siblings as saying that “Warren’s a fanatic. Everything is black and white to him” (p. ?).
Jeff’s has been described by other writers as one who “tried to tighten his control of his followers by disallowing sect members from partaking in modern luxuries such as books, television, radio or newspapers, “unless he was the writer or performer” [cite online source]…. Moreover, during his fiery sermons, he also instructed them to restrict their movement outside the communities and prohibited them from talking with strangers. Jeffs, a master of manipulation, was intent on keeping the world at bay in order to avoid scrutiny from his own community that might result in relinquishing his grasp of the sect. As it was put by one Utah resident, a manager of comic book stores and thus very much one who should know, “Knowledge is power….It’s just so sad that would be deprived to [sic] anyone in this day and age in our country. It’s from the Dark Ages” ( ).
Manguel has suggested that “every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers” (107), but might we not also say the same of the absence of libraries? To condemn a library, to destroy it, is tantamount to saying either that readers for that library do not exist or that their interests are already so thoroughly addressed that the library is redundant or distracting. Herein lies a nexus that is simultaneously and at root the danger of and the danger to libraries, the point at which they meet. The conjunction is captured in widely repeated legends about the destruction of the library collection of ancient Alexandria, one version of which stages the event in the seventh century A.D. with the Muslim conquest of the city and enshrines it in the directive, usually described as “infamous,” from Caliph Omar to his conquering general Amr: “Touching the books you mention, if what is written in them agrees with the Book of God, they are not required; if it disagrees, they are not desired. Destroy them therefore.” * It is the struggle between the intentions of the founders of libraries and the unharnessable effects of books on their readers.
The 2008 newspaper article was occasioned by the fact that local citizens and librarians and even the Utah State Attorney General’s office had organized a call for donations to restore books to the library. Presumably, the missing books of 2011 were part of the response to that earlier call.
During the whole period of the disappearance and restoration of the Colorado City library, Mr. Jeffs was struggling with other forms of what he perceived as invasions of his religious beliefs by that outside world he so desperately sought to deny. In the period from roughly 2006 to 2011, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life-terms in prison in three different states and is currently serving a “life plus ten years” sentence in Texas “for being an accomplice to rape for his role in an arranged marriage involving a 14-year-old girl.” But that, as they say, is another story – or would be if it were not for the fact that libraries continued to be an irritant: “Mr. Jeffs’s attorney said Monday he planned to pursue another change of venue because he had evidence that San Angelo residents frequently checked out anti-FLDS books at a library across the street from the courthouse.” [cite online source]
-iv-
In the time bountifully granted me by the state for nothing more than thinking, you would imagine that, given my circumstances, I have a good many things to think about. And you probably would not imagine that libraries rank very high in my lists. But on the contrary, my experience with libraries has come to seem important to me, has had a great deal to do with bringing me to where I am today. And my subsequent thinking about libraries has brought me to what I can only describe as a self overcoming that I take to be the mark of a truly elevated person.
As you will see, my thoughts in no way represent a compromise with your own. That is, given some lifetimes to dream, I already know that I’d prefer a library that would be of little interest — and of absolutely no use — to a jury of my peers, who tend to make the library as small as their own minds. As I see it, libraries, in common practice, have come to be always a tool of somebody or other. They have become honed by and for the common practice and always turn out to be a danger to somebody in the long run, especially to those like me, whose effort it is to make the mind as capacious and commanding as some ultimate library (and thus to make that library redundant).
Convenience and comfort govern the common mind. Not many people would enjoy the comparative disordering of an unregulated library — that is, the library sans numerical cataloging system. Faced with overwhelming chaos, potential randomness, you have opted for overwhelming order, the seemingly miraculous system that leads you down those rows of tomes to exactly the one you choose to lug home. There is a comforting clustering to card cataloguing as though one were moving through villages each having its own theme or central idea, and each village joined, so that there is no empty space in libraries. The graduation of the cataloguing system causes village to fade into village and the small cluster amount to large clusters, which themselves constitute the totality of the library. There are places in the library where you never tread because the cataloguing system tells you that you are out of your village there.
And so, at the start of this ample allotment of time for introspection, convinced that I am a person of language above all, a word man, if you will, and one who has attained a certain elevation not so much through experience as through intention, I am here now to speak to you of all that I have come to know, and more, about libraries, which you might think of, as I do, as houses of words, of language. In fact, it’s thinking like this that has led me to grow as discouraged with libraries as with language itself. The salvational force of language can be recuperated from the deadening effects of the library only through great efforts of parsimonious extraction for which the ordinary person, the jury of my peers, is not well prepared without supreme guidance.
We need a different charge of language from the common to carry us through. Even the merest study in any respectable library would show you, if you had the mind to see it, that after a certain point — say, the Jiahu inscriptions in the seventh millennium, not a common measure, I know, which is part of my point — writing began its long decline into the sentimentality of word, sentence, paragraph, grammar, that gives you so much comfort, the kind of sorting out and systematizing that reaches its ultimate accessibility in the public library itself, an institution increasingly designed to cater to your every lassitude of human convenience.
I, by contrast, dream of the library not as a place but as an experience that you and yours would not care to undergo, that would not serve your or my or anyone’s convenience, that would be at least as interesting as language itself has been, in which my presence is nowhere a matter of record. In instances like the Safaitic scripts (three different alphabet lists, each in a different order) or the Rongorongo script of Rapa Nui (written in a variation of boustraphedon form) one finds intriguing archives of activity that escape the general softening of writing in world history.
Driven by your tendencies toward polarized thinking of plaintiffs and defendants, you mine libraries for a point (or points)of view. In the smallness of your thinking, you never imagine libraries as being beyond point of view entirely, their streams of language not dammed up by book covers or subject categories or call number systems, or even ideological divides but rather carrying forward the unbroken and diverse play of human inquiry no single part of which you need commit yourself to but rather committing to uncovering the wholeness of the human endeavor to meet the divine. Libraries left in undifferentiated wholeness would not serve your momentary whim or your stiff pursuit of a line of thought but rather would open out their self-selected individual readers to an unpreconstructed incremental perpetually inconclusive engagement, immersion in the open-ended stream of human thought flowing toward the wide sea that will not have its final shape until the last word of the last day falls into place. But who will be the reader then? You?
Thousand Word Studio 