A hot day. The traffic is a little more grating than usual. The world is a mad dog, furiously biting its own tail. Every eye is strained around the edges. You duck inside the first building you come to.
After the glare of the sun, the space seems dark. It is cool and fresh, yet there's something very old about this building, older than the masonry itself. Soon you can see the lines of shelves, and right in front of you, a desk where a woman sits working with a pile of books. She gives you a glance that says, "You needn't talk to me, but I'll be happy to help you if you need it." You walk forward, and you're surrounded by books.
There there are colorful books, comics and vast coffee-table volumes, textbooks and children's stories. There are shelves as far as the eye can see, each one packed with history, geology, fairy tales, adventure, fiction and non-fiction of every type. You throw your head back to smell the air again, and you see the rest.
Five floors rise up above you, each layer of shelves is linked by long, easy stairs. Cloth-and leather-bound editions, hand-drawn encyclopedias, great novels and travelogues from the days when maps were journeys in themselves.
You ascend now, running your hands along the ancient spines, jumping back and forth over hundreds of years as you walk. One or two people, absorbed in the pages, are hunched in fascination in the writing desks and comfortable chairs you find along the way. A child, maybe eight years old, rushes past you along the walkway with two thick brilliant-edged books in his hands.
Now come the poets--a vast selection of epics, songs, odes, ballads, ballades and romances, observations, songs piped through ink to sound around the edges of the world. Essays next, polemics and satires, and up and up, volumes of art and science as they used to be, transitions into modern times. A world--nay, worlds of enjoyment, cloistered away in plain sight on the main street of this tired old town.
Some see all this, get bored and leave, never to return. Others barely know a library is there. But this building, like all public libraries, is free for all who want it, necessary for those who love it, forgotten by those who do without it.
After the glare of the sun, the space seems dark. It is cool and fresh, yet there's something very old about this building, older than the masonry itself. Soon you can see the lines of shelves, and right in front of you, a desk where a woman sits working with a pile of books. She gives you a glance that says, "You needn't talk to me, but I'll be happy to help you if you need it." You walk forward, and you're surrounded by books.
There there are colorful books, comics and vast coffee-table volumes, textbooks and children's stories. There are shelves as far as the eye can see, each one packed with history, geology, fairy tales, adventure, fiction and non-fiction of every type. You throw your head back to smell the air again, and you see the rest.
Five floors rise up above you, each layer of shelves is linked by long, easy stairs. Cloth-and leather-bound editions, hand-drawn encyclopedias, great novels and travelogues from the days when maps were journeys in themselves.
You ascend now, running your hands along the ancient spines, jumping back and forth over hundreds of years as you walk. One or two people, absorbed in the pages, are hunched in fascination in the writing desks and comfortable chairs you find along the way. A child, maybe eight years old, rushes past you along the walkway with two thick brilliant-edged books in his hands.
Now come the poets--a vast selection of epics, songs, odes, ballads, ballades and romances, observations, songs piped through ink to sound around the edges of the world. Essays next, polemics and satires, and up and up, volumes of art and science as they used to be, transitions into modern times. A world--nay, worlds of enjoyment, cloistered away in plain sight on the main street of this tired old town.
Some see all this, get bored and leave, never to return. Others barely know a library is there. But this building, like all public libraries, is free for all who want it, necessary for those who love it, forgotten by those who do without it.
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