I’m a devotee of the library. I grew up in a home that valued the book over most other worldly possessions, and on each Thursday evening, when the old brick building that housed the library in our small town stayed open three hours later than usual, we would go and settle in amongst the stacks. That weekly practice likely formed the foundation of my ongoing love affair with institutional book collections.
Despite this —or maybe because of it— I own relatively few books. There isn’t even a book shelf in our living room. But there is a dedicated shelf just for library books in my office. It is commonly laden with 10 or 40 books. I check out far more than I could ever read. Often the titles are requested online, delivered to our tiny branch from the big regional collection. Some I read, front to back. Many I skim or flip open to random pages in search of some nugget of wisdom or beauty or both.
I’ve been a fan of author David James Duncan since I was in college (The River Why, The Brothers K). A search for his name at our library brought me to a collection of essays by his close friend, now passed, Brian Doyle, One Long River of Song. In the introduction, Duncan shares a yarn spun between the two:
“I recalled an exchange in which we marvelled that the bodies of trees are built by their downward hunger for earth and water and by their upward yearning for light. How wonderful, we agreed, that these paradoxical aims, instead of tearing a tree in two or causing it to die of indecision, cause it to grow tall and strong. And just as wonderful, I wrote to my flown friend, is how during the tree’s afterlife, its former hunger and yearning transmogrifies into the enduring structural integrity known as wood. Wood is a tree’s life history become something so solid that we can hold it in our hands. This is not just some lonely cry or mournful eulogy. Right here in the world where every living thing dies, a fallen tree’s integrity remains so literal that if a luthier adds strings to it, we can turn the departed tree’s sun-yearning and thirst-quenching into the sounds we call live music. And if a seeming lunatic smashes wood’s integrity to a pulp, then makes that pulp into paper, our ink can bring to life stories that multitudes can perform like symphonies in the sanctums of their very own depths and heights.”
Damn. This is why I check a few hundred books out of the library each year. Thank you, DJD.