'A Happy Nothing in the Face of Everything'

No institution open to individual citizens, public or private, is as essential as the library, and none is so undervalued and vulnerable. This judgment is personal. Without libraries, I might be nearly as aliterate (OED: “unwilling to read, although able to do so; disinclined to read”) as many of my contemporaries. Our house was almost bokeless, to use Milton’s word. Reading was not my family’s default mode. In partial defense of my parents, they too were raised by people who could but didn’t read. Books, I sense, were a reproach, a reminder that their educations had been cut short by war, work and circumstance. They prized other sorts of competence, not scholarship, not “book learning.”

The first happily momentous day in my life came in September 1970 when, at age seventeen, I entered for the first time the library at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. The sensation resembled the rush a glutton feels before a feast. I’m not overdramatizing when I say I trembled. For the first time I knew I could find any book I wanted, knowledge that filled me with something like Blake’s “lineaments of Gratified Desire.” In “Reading Like a Child,” Sarah Ruden, poet and translator of Virgil and St. Augustine, recalls her introduction to the Widener Library at Harvard, “that Rhodes Colossus of learning”:

“I was a raiding mouse, a tiny bat foraging in neglected aisles. You could get anything in and through Widener, only occasionally having to seek outside the university through interlibrary loan.”

Early on, my pleasure, and Ruden’s, was spiced with guilt, the product of doing something once discouraged if not forbidden. I was fortunate. Forty-nine years ago I knew how I would spend much of the rest of my life. Ruden writes:

“But I want, as far as possible, to keep reading like a child, beneath the eagle’s wings, on the son of God’s lap, a happy nothing in the face of everything. It is too wonderful for me.”