Libraries

I've been thinking about libraries recently, and how grateful I am that they exist. Reading and books are such a major part of my life that I simply can't imagine a world where they weren't readily available.

I grew up in the country. The grade schools I went to in first through third grade (in Nineveh and Rogersville, PA respectively), were small community schools. In Nineveh there were only three classrooms and three teachers for six grades. First and second grade kids shared a room and a teacher, as did third and fourth, and fifth and sixth. Neither of these two schools were big enough for an actual library. One day a week the Bookmobile would show up. This was the traveling library for the entire school district and I assume it spent the rest of the week at other grade schools. It was essentially a large motor home lined with bookshelves and books.

The librarian was a wonderful woman by the name of Mary Berryman. She was small built, with gray hair, catseye glasses, and a sweater held on by clasps. I know how amazingly cliché this description sounds, but it is the truth. When I was six I thought she was old, but she continued as the district grade school librarian well past the time I graduated college, so my perceptions are a little skewed.

As I've said elsewhere on this blog, I learned to read, mostly from comic books, well before I began first grade. Mom is an avid reader and instilled her love of books in me very early. Library day was my favorite day of the week.

I'm not exactly sure of the chronology of this, but I also remember the Library came to our community during the summer months as well, for a summer reading program. It's possible I went to the Bookmobile before I actually started school. Mom tells me that once when she took me I chose the books I wanted and when I took them to check out Mrs. Berryman asked my Mom if they weren't a little too advanced for me. Mom said they were what I wanted, and if they were too advanced, well then, there was something for me to learn from them. She continues the story that when we returned the books I couldn't wait to tell Mrs. Berryman all about them.

Mrs. Berryman guided thousands of students through the hallowed shelves of her library over the years, but I think it's accurate to say I was one of her favorite kids. Mom instilled my love of books. Mrs. Berryman and the school library facilitated my access to them in a way my family could never have afforded. I was voracious (still am).

Oddly enough, the first three real books (chapter books instead of stuff written primarily for kids), did not come from the library. Mom bought me a copy of the Howard Pyle version of The Adventures of Robin Hood. I inherited copies of both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn from my older brother. I had read all of these by the time I finished third grade.

By the time I entered fourth grade the school district had built a brand new school building in Graysville, PA and consolidated several of the smaller grade schools in this new location. Mrs. Berryman finally had a permanent home for her library, and for the first time I had access to one every day. I couldn't begin to tell you the number of books I read there.

In addition to the library we were periodically given a catalog from Scholastic (or the 1970's equivalent) that we could order books from. I remember getting several in this fashion, including my first copy of All In Color For A Dime, a collection of essays about comics of the Golden Age. This was probably my first, conscious knowledge of comic book history, and definitely my first exposure to the concept of comics scholarship (just as an aside... I loaned my copy of this to the Chatham student I'm advising this semester because one of the essays ties in specifically with the topic she is writing about for her thesis.)

My original copy, with this cover, is long gone.
A revised edition came out a few years ago.

In seventh grade I went to the West Greene High School building (there was no separate middle school then; grades seven through twelve all wandered the same halls and used the same facilities). Of course I very quickly made myself at home in the library there and became a very familiar face to the new librarian, Mrs. Hildreth. The books housed there were aimed at an older audience of course.

During my teen years, in addition to the books I read from the library, I began to buy a lot of cheap paperbacks: Westerns, spy novels, and men's adventure stories with guns and girls. They were the kind of books that were probably inappropriate for my age and certainly not available at the school library. Eventually I discovered Science Fiction and Fantasy and was somewhat redeemed.

During my last year in high school there was a day when the seniors went to work as an assistant with one of the grade school teachers and help with their classes. I couldn't think of anyone back at Graysville I would rather spend the day with than Mrs. Berryman. She proudly introduced me to her classes as someone she was proud of and who had a bright future, because as she told them, I had always read books.

Mary Berryman did eventually retire and lived a long life. She's gone now but shines in my memory as the absolute Platonic ideal of a Librarian.

During college and grad school I had access to libraries of course. I used them primarily for research and class projects, but there was always the reading for pleasure aspect of it. I read a lot of Hesse, Henry Miller, Proust, and Kerouac while at Edinboro.

Somehow though, once I was out of school, I simply didn't go to a library very frequently. I still read, but I was buying most of my material by that time. I felt like I needed to own everything I read. One of my high school teachers, Will Hinerman (more on him in another post), had a large library of books in his home. There were always books around when I was growing up, but I don't think the idea of a personal library ever crossed my mind until I saw his. It became a goal. To supplement the books I bought at the big chain stores and local book stores I haunted used book stores and flea markets. I suppose I have a little bit of the hoarder in me.

So over time I accumulated a lot of books, a fact that was brought home to me a couple of years ago when, for the first time in many years, I needed to move them.

I started going back to the library regularly when I started working in Oakland. The main branch of the Carnegie Library is around the corner from my store. Over time I have realized I don't need to own everything I read (I would already be out of room in my house if that were the case). I'm there frequently and take advantage of many of their services. I have come to know many of the librarians there, and they are all exemplars of the Berryman credo.

There are two people in my life who I consider close, dear friends who are librarians, one at the Carnegie and one at a university library far away. One of them tells me that every day in the stacks she hears the books sing to her and feels it is a sacred duty to take care of them. The other one refers to the library as a “Temple for the Secular Soul.” I love that they both use the language of the sacred to refer to what they do.

For most of recorded history the ability to read was reserved to a special few. It was one of the things only the very privileged ever learned. The idea of archiving the collected knowledge of the world, its history and its stories, is one of the greatest ideas in our history. Today, when the skill of reading is taught to everyone, I fear it is all too often taken for granted. The ability to read was kept from the lower classes, slaves specifically, in an effort to keep people uninformed and more easily controlled. Ideas can be dangerous things, especially to the status quo. Today, when information is at our fingertips, when the wisdom of the ages is readily available, far too many people choose to remain willfully illiterate. Books are gateways to other worlds, to other ways of thinking, to knowledge and wisdom, to entertainment and enlightenment and empowerment.

In a recent conversation with one of my librarian friends she told me that someone had accused her of reading too much. My immediate response was to say that there's no such thing as reading too much. This was based on my own belief that there are far more books I want to read than I will ever be able to read in my lifetime. After giving it some more thought I do want to amend my initial kneejerk reaction. It is possible to read too much if you never actually go out and have a life as well. Your life is your story; you are writing your own book every day. It should be filled with something other than reading. But reading provides guideposts and maps for the kind of life you want to live.

In spite of the pages I devour, I don't think I live to read.

I read to live.

Flea Markets

I went to a Flea Market in Waynesburg yesterday. They have one every Tuesday and Saturday at the Greene County Fairgrounds. Over the years it has dwindled to very few set-ups and not much reason to go. Dad and Mom go to hang with friends, drink coffee and, in Dad's case, trade pocketknives with his cronies.

I've gone to Flea Markets with them frequently over the years. I enjoy the experience but with rare exceptions I don't really search them out on my own. I'm never really looking for anything specific, and in spite of my collection of books, comics and music I don't really consider myself a real "collector" of anything. When I'm at a Flea Market I scan the tables for those sorts of things and hope to find something cheap to read, or a CD to fill a hole in my collection that I want but would never spend full price on.

There was an extra attraction yesterday. A separate building at the fairgrounds housed a different Flea Market. All of the proceeds went to support the Greene County Humane Society. There was a bunch of donated stuff on quite a few tables and more people wandering the aisles than usually seen at the Saturday sale.

I'm not proud of this, but I spent time looking at the cheap plastic flower arrangements, the lamps shaped like clowns, the knick-knacks and bric-a-brac and wondered who had spent money on all this crap in the first place. Tacky and cheap, most of it could have been marketed, when new, as future flea market fodder or landfill. I simply couldn't imagine anyone wanting to own most of this stuff when it was new, let alone now that it was used and beat. The building felt like a graveyard of wasted money.

I found a table full of books and went to look for something to read. I found a copy of Bones of the Moon by Jonathan Carroll, one of my favorite contemporary authors. This surprised and pleased me since this is an author very few people I know seem to have heard of. I own several of his books and have read more from the Library. I couldn't remember if this was one I owned or not, but for a quarter it was worth picking up (turns out I do own it already, but now I have a gift for someone).

While thumbing though it I remembered a quote from another Carroll novel, Outside the Dog Museum, about flea markets that I had saved quite some time ago;

"Flea markets remind us of how narrow and fixed our values are: What unimaginable things can have meaning to people! A man bought a bent and rusty 1983 Nevada license plate for one hundred schillings. One woman did a brisk trade selling single used, unmatchable shoes, and empty record album sleeves. Astonished, I turned to Nicholas and asked, “How much do you think she charges for that stuff?” He said nothing, but a moment later the thought came that valuing something meant understanding it better than the next guy. To me, it was absurd buying an old license plate­–but what if the man who bought it knew better? Knew more about it, even if that knowledge seemed spurious or even insane to me. And even if it was worthless, didn’t his wanting it make his imagination broader and grander than mine?"

I like that idea, and felt immediately abashed at my prior judgement. No matter how bizarre or meaningless I personally thought an object to be, at some point someone had looked at it, bright and shiny and new on the shelf, and thought, "That's awesome... I want that." Some of the items would make the imagination incredibly broad and grand, in my opinion. But every item in this graveyard, every bent, tarnished, ratty, well-used piece of it, had once enchanted someone.

There are bits of magic all around us. We just need eyes to see it.

Magic Theater. For Madmen Only.

“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.” Hermann Hesse

I first read Hermann Hesse the year I turned 25. I was in grad school at the time and in the middle of exploring literature and the great writers and his name was on the list. At the time I'm pretty sure that his book Steppenwolf (yes, it's where the band and the Jack Kirby character got their name), was the only work of his I had heard of. If memory serves I found a used paperback copy of it one day while shopping for comics at Books Galore in Erie. I had no idea that this was going to be one of the seminal books of my life.

I read somewhere that later in his life Hesse expressed surprise that Steppenwolf had found an audience among young people. He had written it when he himself was nearing 50, and the protagonist of the novel, Harry Haller, is the same age. Hesse believed he was addressing the concerns on middle age, yet the book's primary popularity was among the college-age reader.

All I know is at the time Steppenwolf seemed to speak to everything I was going through in my life. I remember thinking that here was an author who had found the words to my soul and he had done it years before I had been born. Yes, I know how young and overly dramatic and poetic that may sound. But, one of the things I love about Hesse's writing is that throughout his life his voice remained young and overly dramatic and poetic. He was unburdened by the post-modern, morbidly self-aware fear of seeming sentimental (since when should genuine sentiment be considered a bad thing?).

It's difficult to remember just what it was that struck me so strongly. I certainly wasn't a depressed middle-age man who was contemplating suicide. I wasn't old enough to feel like I had missed out on life. But there was something.

Part of it was the duality of personality he talked about (and this isn't a book review, so I'm not going into the plot here... read it). I have always struggled to balance the extroverted and introverted parts of myself. I was yearning for the life of the artist, the life of the soul, and at times feeling bogged down with the reality of this world. It is the tension between the sacred and the profane that is at the heart of the novel. I still feel that at times, though not as profoundly as Harry Haller. I think any creative person in a life-long relationship with their muse feels this.

This started me on a Hesse kick and I read pretty much everything by him I could get my hands on. My bookshelves still hold a large Hesse collection, including a first edition of a poetry collection called Hours In The Garden, a birthday gift from A_. I devoured his work. Though I read them out of order I was able to see the progression of his thought and the development of the themes that ran throughout. His way of looking at the world informed my own and I spent a lot of time trying to write like him before I realized I needed to find my own voice.

The year I turned 40 I reread Steppenwolf and once again it seemed to speak to everything I was going through in my life. How could that be? I was fifteen years older, no longer a callow youth, and certainly still not a depressed, suicidal middle-age man. That was the year I signed the contract to have my first novel published, so I was at least on my way to finding my own voice (and my novel really doesn't resemble a Hesse novel at all). I resolved then to put it back on the shelf and read again the year I turned 50.

I just finished rereading it. For the first time I came to this book at the age of the protagonist. I also came to it with a different perspective than either of the last two times. I had expectations this time. Did it speak to everything going on in my life? Yes, but not in the same way. I read it this time looking for the ways it would resonate. More than speaking to me now I was aware of how many of the ideas have simply become a part of my life. Thanks to Harry Haller's struggles I didn't have to go through the same thing. Though inarguably middle-aged, I'm still not a depressed, suicidal man who feels like he has missed out on life.

Steppenwolf served as a cautionary tale. I learned early not miss opportunities that arose. Unlike Haller I learned to dance, and to enjoy music and the joys of the sensual world. The sacred and the profane both exist, hand in hand, and they are both a part of my life and each would probably be unrecognizable without the other.

There were certainly still lessons to be learned. I was more aware of Hesse's political commentary this time around, and how it reflected my own current thoughts on the topic. It's a subject I can get easily mired in, much to my emotional detriment. There are ideas in the novel I need to think through to help me be more at peace with these issues.

Let me quote a passage from early in the novel...

“Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.”

This was certainly true of the world when Hesse wrote it. He says in the novel that Nietzsche suffered what everyone was suffering, only a generation earlier. This was written in the early days of radio, and worldwide communication was just starting to be taken for granted. We now live in a time when not only two ages, cultures and religions overlap, but when all cultures and religions overlap in ways they never have before. In the Information Age time has sped up. Changes in technology have both united the world and separated us in unprecedented ways. Does this, in Hesse's words, reduce us to real suffering, to hell? Does the world suffer more now than ever before, or are we simply more informed about it? Are there more Harry Hallers out there now, living the famed life of quiet desperation than ever before? I don't know. If so, there are lessons in Hesse that can help.

I am still enamored of Hesse, and amazed that I can still find gold in his work. This is alchemy as it's meant to be understood. It's the transformation of lead (base material, the profane) into gold (spiritual material, the sacred).

Maybe I'll read it again when I turn 75.