On Reading Books Through Their Backs

I.

I HAVE a way every two or three days or so, of an afternoon, of going down to our library, sliding into the little gate by the shelves, and taking a long empty walk there. I have found that nothing quite takes the place of it for me, — wandering up and down the aisles of my ignorance, letting myself be loomed at, staring doggedly back. I always feel when I go out the great door as if I had won a victory. I have at least faced the facts. I swing off to my tramp on the hills where is the sense of space, as if I had faced the Bully of the World, the whole assembled world, in his own den, and he had given me a license to live.

Of course it only lasts a little while. One soon feels a library nowadays pulling on him. One has to go back and do it all over again, but for the time being it affords infinite relief. It sets one in right relations to the universe, to the Original Plan of Things. One suspects that if God had originally intended that men on this planet should be crowded off by books on it, it would not have been put off to the twentieth century.

I was saying something of this sort to the Presiding Genius of the State of Massachusetts the other day, and when I was through he said promptly, “ The way a man feels in a library (if any one can get him to tell it) lets out more about a man than anything else in the world.”

It did not seem best to make a reply to this. I did n’t think it would do either of us any good.

Finally, in spite of myself, I spoke up and allowed that I felt as intelligent in a library as anybody.

He did not say anything.

When I asked him what he thought being intelligent in a library was, he took the general ground that it consisted in always knowing what one was about there, in knowing exactly what one wanted.

I replied that I did not think that that was a very intelligent state of mind to be in, in a library.

Then I waited while he told me (fifteen minutes) what an intelligent mind was anywhere (nearly everywhere, it seemed to me). But I did not wait in vain, and at last when he had come around to it, and had asked me what I thought the feeling of intelligence consisted in, in libraries, I said it consisted in being pulled on by the books.

I said quite a little after this, and of course the general run of my argument was that I was rather intelligent myself. The P. G. S. of M. had little to say to this, and after he had said how intelligent he was awhile, the conversation was dropped.

The question that concerns me is, what shall a man do, how shall he act, when he finds himself in the hush of a great library, — opens the door upon it, stands and waits in the midst of it, with his poor outstretched soul all by himself before IT, — and feels the books pulling on him ? I always feel as if it were a sort of infinite Cross Roads. The last thing I want to know in a library is exactly what I want there. I am tired of knowing what I want. I am always knowing what I want. I can know what I want almost anywhere. If there is a place left on God’s earth where a modern man can go and go regularly and not know what he wants awhile, in Heaven’s name why not let him hold on to it ? I am as fond as the next man, I think, of knowing what I am about, but when I find myself ushered into a great library I do not know what I am about any sooner than I can help. I shall know soon enough — God forgive me ! When it is given to a man to stand in the Assembly Room of Nations, to feel the ages, all the ages, gathering around him, flowing past his life, to listen to the immortal stir of Thought, to the doings of The Dead, why should a man interrupt — interrupt a whole world — to know what he is about ? I stand at the junction of all Time and Space. I am the three tenses. I read the newspaper of the universe.

It fades away after a little, I know. I go to the card catalogue like a lamb to the slaughter, poke my head into Knowledge — somewhere — and am lost, but the light of it on the spirit does not fade away. It leaves a glow there. It plays on the pages afterward.

There is a certain fine excitement about taking a library in this fashion, a sense of spaciousness of joy in it, which one is almost always sure to miss in libraries — most libraries — by staying in them. The only way one can get any real good out of a modern library seems to be by going away in the nick of time. If one stays there is no help for it. One is soon standing before the card catalogue sorting one’s wits out in it, filing them away, and the sense of boundlessness both in one’s self and everybody else — the thing a library is for — is fenced off forever.

At least it seems fenced off forever. One sees the universe barred and patterned off with a kind of grating before it. It is a card catalogue universe.

I can only speak for one, but I must say, for myself, that as compared with this feeling one has in the door, this feeling of standing over a library — mere reading in it, sitting down and letting one’s self be tucked into a single book in it — is a humiliating experience.

II.

I am not unaware that this will seem to some — this empty doting on infinity, this standing and staring at All-knowledge — a mere dizzying exercise, whirling one’s head round and round in Nothing, for Nothing. And I am not unaware that it would be unbecoming in me or in any other man to feel superior to a card catalogue.

A card catalogue, of course, as a device for making a kind of tunnel for one’s mind in a library — for working one’s way through it — is useful and necessary to all of us. Certainly, if a man insists on having infinity in a convenient form — infinity in a box — it would be hard to find anything better to have it in than a card catalogue.

But there are times when one does not want infinity in a box. He loses the best part of it that way. He prefers it in its natural state. All that I am contending for is, that when these times come, the times when a man likes to feel infinite knowledge crowding round him, — feel it through the backs of unopened books, and likes to stand still and think about it, worship with the thought of it, — he ought to be allowed to do so. It is true that there is no sign up against it (against thinking in libraries). But there might as well be. It amounts to the same thing. No one is expected to. People are expected to keep up an appearance, at least, of doing something else there. I do not dare to hope that the next time I am caught standing and staring in a library, with a kind of blank, happy look, I shall not be considered by all my kind intellectually disreputable for it. I admit that it does not look intelligent — this standing by a door and taking in a sweep of books — this reading a whole library at once. I can imagine how it looks. It looks like listening to a kind of cloth and paper chorus — foolish enough, but if I go out of the door to the hills again, refreshed for them and lifted up to them, with the strength of the ages in my limbs, great voices all around me, flocking on my solitary walk — who shall gainsay me ?

Gerald Stanley Lee.