'This, Books Can Do . . .'

At age ten I attended the grand opening of the new public library in Parma Heights, Ohio, within easy walking distance of our house. Next door was Yorktown Lanes, the bowling alley dedicated two years earlier. Across the road was the municipal swimming pool where my mother had been giving swimming lessons since 1957, and next to it was the miniature golf course (“putt-putt”) that I would manage for three summers beginning in 1970. Nearby were the municipal tennis courts. This concentration of recreation today strikes me as remarkable. No wonder my generation was spoiled rotten. 

Now the city is demolishing the old library and building a new one nearby, where the ice rink and indoor soccer field once stood. Some good-natured dissenters have protested the razing but top-down progress is tough to reverse. The old library’s design is notably ugly. We knew that even in 1963, but it was the “Space Age” and the building was said to resemble a flying saucer. Inside, none of the rooms were quadrilaterals. All were shaped roughly like slices of pie. At the center were the circulation desk and shelves of periodicals. That’s where I first read Martin Gardner’s “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American.

 

Within the next few years I would, without guidance or much of a critical sense, discover literature in that library. I borrowed Kafka’s The Castle, John Updike’s Pigeon Feathers, Tom Disch’s Camp Concentration, Mark Twain’s Autobiography, Steve Allen’s The Funny Men, T.S. Eliot’s Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950, Kipling’s Kim and Fletcher Pratt’s The Civil War. I permit myself to get nostalgic about those self-guided literary explorations. They started a way of life that remains in place today. I still wander among library shelves, trusting in intuition. The old building was tacky and is probably better off knocked down and hauled away. Of course, most contemporary architecture is a scandal and I have little trust in the aesthetic qualities of the new library. The unfairly forgotten George Crabbe writes in The Library (1781):

 

“But what strange art, what magic can dispose

The troubled mind to change its native woes?

Or lead us willing from ourselves, to see

Others more wretched, more undone than we?

This, Books can do; — nor this alone; they give

New views to life, and teach us how to live;

They soothe the grieved, the stubborn they chastise,

Fools they admonish, and confirm the wise:

Their aid they yield to all: they never shun

The man of sorrow, nor the wretch undone:

Unlike the hard, the selfish, and the proud,

They fly not sullen from the suppliant crowd;

Nor tell to various people various things,

But show to subjects, what they show to kings.”

 

The tone is elevated and the iambic pentameter a little plodding but Crabbe is on to something: “Their aid they yield to all . . .”