'Companionable Room'

I had a minor problem with the university library’s catalog. When I requested two books stored off-site in the Library Service Center I got this message: “No items can fulfill the submitted request.” That made no sense and I couldn’t figure out a way around the roadblock, so I wrote a librarian I’ve known for years. It was a glitch I didn’t understand, she ordered the books and they will be waiting for me when I visit the library on Saturday. I know my way around libraries and seldom require assistance, but yet again I’m grateful not just for access to millions of books but for librarians – at their best, culture’s caretakers. 

Timothy Steele is a poet and a scholar dependent on libraries. In “The Library” (The Color Wheel, 1994) he asks, “Cultural oasis? / Few would object to its conserving aims.” In a non-political sense, a library is conservative. Steele writes of “all the ancient libraries whose collections / Have vanished in a massive wordless void,” and adds:

 

“The consolation? Some things were preserved,

Technology reduces now what’s lost,

And learning, as it’s presently deployed,

Is safe from any partial holocaust.”

 

Ours is increasingly an alliterate age. Many non-readers no longer respect books, and some are actively hostile. Books pose an irritating reproach. Have we reached an Eloi/Morlock moment? Not quite but Wells’ oversimplified future seems at least possible if not inevitable. Some of us can still take comfort in another Steele poem, “Homage to a Carnegie Library” (also from The Color Wheel):

 

“Companionable room,

In that early darkness

You stood in promise

Of a sunnier time.”

 

Books remain a civilizing presence – a “cultural oasis.” In one of his critical books, Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter (1990), Steele includes poetry among the prerequisites of a good, sustainable life:

 

“What is most essential to human life and to its continuance remains a love of nature, an enthusiasm for justice, a readiness of good humor, a spontaneous susceptibility to beauty and joy, an interest in our past, a hope for our future, and above all, a desire that others should have the opportunity and encouragement to share these qualities. An art of measured speech nourishes these qualities in a way no other pursuit can.”