Libraries

I believe in libraries because they have been a lifeline for me. Libraries provide books; they embody the idea that books are the vehicles of knowledge and pleasure, essential elements in the pursuit of happiness, and this I also believe. The Brownell Library in Little Compton RI, to which this blog is linked, is about the tenth library I have known since my mother took me as a small child to the library in Aurora, New York and introduced me to the joys of picking out books. There were plenty of books in our house, but we always went to the library. Today libraries, ours included, offer computers, audio materials, story hours, etc. But the Tudor Revival building that housed the Aurora library was a quieter place. The librarian ruled with a firm hand on the date stamp and warning looks at disturbers of the peace—as did the stern-faced woman behind the desk at the Brownell when I first went there some 50 years ago. Yet I felt at home, and that Christmas I asked for a date stamp so I could play library, which I did, thus defacing a number of my books.
As an only child who was home schooled for a while, books were my companions. After Aurora I got them from the library in Northfield Minnesota, today one of the few remaining Carnegie libraries that is still a library—its website shows an elegant space but what I remember is the dusty smell of the books and the sunlight on the reading room tables. My mother persuaded the librarian to give me access to the adult literature, believing that the more widely I read the sooner I’d be equipped to separate the good from the bad. I went to a high school I chose primarily for its library, a room with a fireplace and leather couches in which I could hide of an afternoon and read. I married early and kept on searching out libraries, now with my children in tow. A voracious reader’s appetite knows no bounds, and libraries provide the needed food.
When we settled in Providence I discovered the Athenaeum, one of the oldest private libraries in the country, where I worked both as a volunteer and an employee; I finally had an official date stamp. I loved observing the patrons, young and old, like the gentleman who came in every afternoon whose routine depended on touching certain objects in order, and the children whose heads barely reached over the top of the desk, their harassed mothers laden with armloads of overdue books.
The staff at the Brownell is anything but stern. I rely mostly on interlibrary loan and make my requests on line, but I still love walking into the library and seeing all that goes on now; there is a direct line between the child who loved books and the woman who believes in libraries as repositories of companionship, possibility and life-enhancing pleasure and knowledge.