IN A LIBRARY, I grew up among books and friendly librarians with balding heads and skinny ponytails who had my best interests at heart, I believed, and never shied away from a request. Where can I find the latest copy of Mad Magazine, I am sure I asked at least once in my early days. Steve, the librarian, always knew where to find the good stuff.
This week is national library week and I’m celebrating all the ways the library keeps us sane and sound and stitched together to one another, even in the darkest of times, even when our nation’s burning books and tossing them into garbage trucks and deploring them and finding them offensive, I just never anticipated this, having read Farenheit 451 as fiction when I was a teen.
My father constantly called the local librarians as his companions and collaborators—and they always obliged his requests. Toward the end of this life, he spent more time at home and hosted weekly live jazz shows in his living room. He spent so much careful time curating each playlist and he often needed refreshers on dates and composers and such. So he’d call up the library and chat away to the kind reference librarian on the other end of the line and it made him feel human and whole and the mutuality created the momentum to keep him going.
The library is a sacred place and it’s also a spiritual promise. The minute you step inside one it elevates the soul’s purpose, to ask questions and stay curious. I first heard about the idea of an inner mystical library from a woman who joined me for a poetry walk I was leading in Stone Town. She explained it as a “cosmic catalogue” that contains the entire universe of all souls’ experiences—past, present and future.
At night, I listen to guided meditations to take me to the cosmic library, but I usually fall asleep before I can access any information. The mystic and educator Rudolf Steiner claims he used the Akashic Records to access details about allegedly mythical places like Atlantis. Who knows what to believe unless you’ve seen it yourself and been there yourself and possess the desire to believe? Akasha, the Sanskrit word for sky.
May we all be inscribed in the next chapter of the Book of Life, we tell each other around every Jewish new year. It’s amusing but also kind of scary to think of God as a moody writer who determines which names get sealed into the book of life every year. If the book is a metaphor, the library extends it—to contain all stories, those that have already been written, those we are still living, and those still yet to come, with death being only one of many possible endings.
Where do we store these “indestructible tablets of the astral light" except in a library, after all? The library’s main promise is a collective one—a communal storing of all questions converted into possibilities—a third space, a central place to gather and ponder, exchange and rearrange the rooms within our hearts-minds-souls. I love going to the library, it just makes me feel better, knowing I’ve taken a step toward becoming a tiny bit more aware.
Some libraries are sad—the ones plunged into darkness and dust, the ones abandoned and neglected in the marbled ruins of their former glory, the ones punished by disrepair and lack of care, their steps cracked up to the doors of heaven—I like to visit libraries wherever I go and there find the will of the people and their wants and their hopes, however dashed or coded. Private libraries count, but the ones built specifically for anyone and everyone—the people’s library—offer the most communal promise.
Where do you find silence? The forest, or the library. Well, the library is a forest. And the forest is a library. Where do you find silence? The temple, or the library? So, the temple is a divine library, and the library is a divine temple. You get the idea. I’m riffing here, in honor of libraries, in praise of the spaces that offer a patch of peace.
Happy National Library Week!
This week is national library week and I’m celebrating all the ways the library keeps us sane and sound and stitched together to one another, even in the darkest of times, even when our nation’s burning books and tossing them into garbage trucks and deploring them and finding them offensive, I just never anticipated this, having read Farenheit 451 as fiction when I was a teen.
My father constantly called the local librarians as his companions and collaborators—and they always obliged his requests. Toward the end of this life, he spent more time at home and hosted weekly live jazz shows in his living room. He spent so much careful time curating each playlist and he often needed refreshers on dates and composers and such. So he’d call up the library and chat away to the kind reference librarian on the other end of the line and it made him feel human and whole and the mutuality created the momentum to keep him going.
The library is a sacred place and it’s also a spiritual promise. The minute you step inside one it elevates the soul’s purpose, to ask questions and stay curious. I first heard about the idea of an inner mystical library from a woman who joined me for a poetry walk I was leading in Stone Town. She explained it as a “cosmic catalogue” that contains the entire universe of all souls’ experiences—past, present and future.
At night, I listen to guided meditations to take me to the cosmic library, but I usually fall asleep before I can access any information. The mystic and educator Rudolf Steiner claims he used the Akashic Records to access details about allegedly mythical places like Atlantis. Who knows what to believe unless you’ve seen it yourself and been there yourself and possess the desire to believe? Akasha, the Sanskrit word for sky.
May we all be inscribed in the next chapter of the Book of Life, we tell each other around every Jewish new year. It’s amusing but also kind of scary to think of God as a moody writer who determines which names get sealed into the book of life every year. If the book is a metaphor, the library extends it—to contain all stories, those that have already been written, those we are still living, and those still yet to come, with death being only one of many possible endings.
Where do we store these “indestructible tablets of the astral light" except in a library, after all? The library’s main promise is a collective one—a communal storing of all questions converted into possibilities—a third space, a central place to gather and ponder, exchange and rearrange the rooms within our hearts-minds-souls. I love going to the library, it just makes me feel better, knowing I’ve taken a step toward becoming a tiny bit more aware.
Some libraries are sad—the ones plunged into darkness and dust, the ones abandoned and neglected in the marbled ruins of their former glory, the ones punished by disrepair and lack of care, their steps cracked up to the doors of heaven—I like to visit libraries wherever I go and there find the will of the people and their wants and their hopes, however dashed or coded. Private libraries count, but the ones built specifically for anyone and everyone—the people’s library—offer the most communal promise.
Where do you find silence? The forest, or the library. Well, the library is a forest. And the forest is a library. Where do you find silence? The temple, or the library? So, the temple is a divine library, and the library is a divine temple. You get the idea. I’m riffing here, in honor of libraries, in praise of the spaces that offer a patch of peace.
Happy National Library Week!
