'Look for Truth, for Knowledge, for Wisdom'

“The library is, and always has been, the heart of a college. . . . For professors--professors of the humanities, at any rate--as much as students, are the creatures of the library. Just as the laboratory is the domain of the sciences, so the library is the domain of the humanities. For it is the library that is the repository of the learning and wisdom that are transmitted from the professors to the students.” 

I can hear the snorts over “learning and wisdom.” How quaint. What’s “wisdom” got to do with acquiring a college degree? Since I started working remotely more than three years ago, I’ve reduced my library visits to once a week, meaning I keep lists of the books I want to borrow on Saturday. Much of the staff at the circulation desk, students and library employees, is new and young. They often comment on the number of books I check out but I no longer have spontaneous conversations about books. One librarian used to chat about William Maxwell. She’s from Lincoln, Ill., his birthplace. Another woman had lived in Ireland and loved Yeats. With a third, born in Mexico, I talked about Juan Rulfo and Octavio Paz. These were polite social exchanges, but with content important to me and the librarians.

 

Borrowing books is now strictly a formal transaction, like depositing a check at the bank. Also, the third floor – fine arts, Russian and other Slavic literatures, much of the French collection, etc. – is typically empty. I often have the place to myself.

 

I was a lazy, incompetent undergraduate but I virtually lived in the library. It was a paradise, a home I didn’t know I wanted until I got there. I savored the sense that virtually any book I wanted was on the shelf – virtually instant gratification. Until then I had relied on bookstores and public libraries. I remember when my brother and I almost simultaneously discovered that all books are linked to other books, that following such linkages might supply you with a pretty good education, regardless of the academic degrees you earned.        

 

The passage at the top is from “Revolution in the Library,” an essay by the late scholar of Victorian England, Gertrude Himmelfarb, published in 1999 in Library Trends, a journal of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It was still early in the process of digitalizing everything. Enthusiasts were proclaiming an imminent utopia, learning for the masses, accessible to everyone with a computer. That’s not quite how it worked out. Himmelfarb is a realist with an understanding of human nature. For many reasons, the humanities and their conjoined twin, reading, have shriveled. She goes on:

 

“The humanities are an essentially human enterprise--an enterprise to which human beings have devoted themselves for all of civilized history. The record of that enterprise reposes in the library in the form of books--a vast multitude of books, including, to be sure, many worthless or meretricious ones, but also all the great ones. These are the books that sustain our minds and inspire our imaginations. It is there that we look for truth, for knowledge, for wisdom. And it is these ideals that we hope will survive our latest revolution.”

 

In her 2009 volume, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (Encounter Books), Himmelfarb writes:

 

“Victorian writers seem to have had an enormous capacity for reading as well as writing (books, essays, reviews, and voluminous letters), all of this while traveling incessantly, often under difficult conditions, and nurturing varieties of ailments, some of which were nearly incapacitating. Eliot was more than their equal. . . . it is impressive evidence of an extraordinary breadth of interests and knowledge.”