Reading saves your world.
Essay by Michael Pastore
Synchronicities -- meaningful coincidences -- always strike you at the most surprising times. A few weeks ago, sitting in my living room, I was thinking about the fate of America's 117,000 public libraries, endangered species that might one day become extinct. There are some people who are not troubled by this notion, and claim that the public buildings might easily be replaced a massive online library with search engines that could access every book.
At this grim thought I noticed my bookshelves trembling and swaying with an ominous intent. These shelves are made of pine-wood planks, supported on each side by carefully-measured stacks of books instead of cinder blocks. Before I could question the wisdom of this pennypinching improvisation, the shelves collapsed. I dove off the chair onto the carpet and then covered my head with both hands. After the crash, a lamp was broken, and the floor was covered with more than eight-hundred volumes. I had narrowly escaped being crushed, or buried alive, beneath Western civilization's most life-enhancing books.
The Brazilian author Machado de Assis wrote: "He who escapes a mortal danger loves life with a new intensity." ... The danger sharpened my senses; my literary life flashed before my eyes. In an instant I realized how the library makes a difference in my life.
The library gives me information. Diligent and tech-savvy as I am, I cannot keep up with the pace of the information explosion. The last time I counted, there were more than 8 billion web pages, more than 100,000 new books published last year, 24,000 newspapers and magazines, countless academic journals, and approximately 20,000 films. I depend on the library, and its trained reference staff, to do what I have no time or skill to do: organize these proliferating worlds of information, and make this boundless information easy to find and to access.
The library preserves the best books. "How many a man," wrote the booklover Henry David Thoreau, "has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!" The Web is a goulash of knowledge, folly, pornography and advertising: when you want the world's profound ideas -- past, present, and future -- look in the books.
The library provides a quiet place and a chance for solitude. Even the little town of Ithaca can seem too busy at times: at this moment, outside my window, is a dinosaur-sized truck cacophonously tearing up the street. For quiet and a pleasant place to be alone, the library is peaceful refuge.
The library connects me with people ... through events and programs, or simply as a place to meet old friends and make new ones. Political issues and time-shortages pull people apart; the library brings people together.
For all ages -- children, teens, and grown-ups -- the humble library is more than a hall of dusty bookshelves: it is a center for learning and personal growth. The library provides the latest information; the books that matter; a quiet place in a stressful age; and the opportunity to meet people and to share sincere conversations and life-changing ideas. It's not precise to say that the public library is merely 'important'. For everyone who cares about the quality of life, the library is indispensable.
—Michael Pastore
About the Reviewer
Michael Pastore is the Editorial Director of BookLovers Review and Zorba Press. Currently he is writing his fourth novel, and working to establish the Youthtopia Institute and Youthtopia website, devoted to children, creativity and the arts, humanized technology, and a sustainable world.
BookLovers Review is Copyright © 2005 by Michael Pastore. Copyrights to the reviews are owned by the individual reviewers.
