Early Morning Library

The basketball practice drop off for Elias this morning was a 6am affair that got me to work earlier than usual.  I am not typically here when it is still dark and so I got a different look at this part of the city.  I thought the library looked particularly lovely and had to scope it out a bit.  Fortunately, it is not so bitter cold this morning as it has been recently.

The words carved in stone at the top indicate this library was built with the help of Andrew Carnegie which reminds me of the equally beautiful if not substantially smaller library in the town I grew up in.  It was also a Carnegie library and the place I loved to inhabit as a kind of portal to other worlds to escape from the mundane.  It was in this small town library that I tackled my first “adult” book, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, as a 12 year old boy.  This was in the midst of a steady diet of SciFi/Fantasy books like Rivets & Sprockets, Escape to the Mushroom Planet, and A Wrinkle in Time.  This is also the library that my grandfather visited and inked out all the bad words in the book he was reading b/c he found them offensive.  

Libraries still hold a kind of thrall over me.  It saddens me that my kids do not likely share this feeling as the technological monolith of screens has eclipsed our cultural existence.  We have externalized an internal process, which is indicative of a regression in terms of human development.  I think of the melancholy protagonist of George Orwell’s 1984 trying to hide himself from the obligatory screen in his room that watches everyone’s activities.  We have finally arrived at this dystopian reality by way of a rampant consumerism that stalks our viewing and online habits.  

Paradoxically, I believe the library remains an archaically disconnected place that can connect us on a deeper level as a community if we so choose.

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