Libraries are one of the all time great ideas in the world. Think of the democratic spirit that inspires them. Plato, Shakespeare, Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Emily Dickinson, Karl Marx – why, the entire history of human thought is to be found in a library, equally, where all may seek what their mind desires. Indeed, if a great idea of the past has not found its way into a library, we can safely say that idea has died. As Shakespeare says in one of his several sonnets on this theme: “Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes” shall outlive the power of powerful words. They “shall still shine bright/ even in the face of all posterity.” One wonders if the libraries of the world are not really the way to immortality. Homer is still read and understood, still speaks to fourteen-year-old minds, now, two and a half millennia after he wrote of the great journeys of Odysseus.
Not too many centuries ago, it was felt that the really important wisdom and knowledge had to be kept under lock and key. Only the wealthy could afford a personal library, and only the priestly elites could be trusted with the deeper truths of life. Often the major task of a monastery would be to transcribe sacred texts by hand. Lindisfarne in the north of England was such a monastery and although the buildings which housed the monastery were pillaged by the Vikings in the 8th century, the books can now be read and admired by all. It was not until the fifteenth century that a Gutenberg was able to invent a mechanical device for mass producing books, and not until the Protestant Reformation that the esoteric nature of a library was challenged. Now, it was felt, not just the few educated Latin speakers should read the sacred truths of the Bible; even lowlife like you and me were seen as fit receptors of God’s word. As William Blake said a couple of centuries after that, “Now it is permitted to understand the mysteries of the universe.”
Many great thinkers have hatched their schemes and theories by means of a library: Karl Marx, a German who lived and thought in England, did the thinking and writing that influenced many millions of lives, for ill or for good, in the “reading room” of the magnificent British Museum – a library. Eldridge Cleaver, a Black Panther from the sixties, found, as many before and after him, the redemptive power of prison libraries. Is it any wonder that the worth of a university is often measured by the worth of its library. And what a wonder a university library is! Go visit the Mount Allison Library. Although small by the standards of Oxford University, or University of Toronto, its resources are still staggering. Visit the basement and see the extent of periodicals (magazines and journals) purchased on a monthly basis. Glance at the reference books found on the main floor. Peek through the upper stacks – say, in the art section, or the literature area. Indeed, so staggering is the effect of a library that it might well have the negative effect of overwhelming any spirit of curiosity, any drive to know – due to the scope of what humankind has already learned.
Yet, what good is a resource that goes unused? If a monkey sat in a library for twenty years, it would never find a way into the secret world of the paper it held. Never to enter a library and allow it to incite your curiosity makes us brother and sister to the monkey. ARHS has the best librarian working in Nova Scotia schools (yeh, I know, I haven’t met the rest of you, but I still make the case) and she employs her considerable intellect and energies to building a continuously improving library. Philip Roth, the great American novelist, says the world does not need more writers – it needs more readers. The failure to read will eventually be the failure of democracy, as George Orwell suggests in “Politics and the English Language.”
Mrs. Mathews needs readers, not just surfers. Picking at information is not the same as placing yourself in the mind of a great writer for the duration of an entire book. Your country needs readers to keep alive the ideas of the past that have sustained us. Your deeper self needs you to read, to nourish it in its hunger. Reading is a moral act and the library the church of the mind.
-Mr. Bauld, ARHS