In This Essay

“Do School Libraries Need Books?” from Room for Debate, The New York Times, February 10, 2010

“The Library, Through Students’ Eyes” from Room for Debate, The New York Times, February 14, 2010

“A library without books” by David Abel, The Boston Globe, September 4, 2009

“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, by Nicholas Carr, The Atlantic, July/August 2008

I remember reading in The Boston Globe last September that a private school in Massachusetts had given up its collection of books. I was aghast.

That Cushing Academy gave away collection of books, turning its library into a digital media center, continues to bother me.

Since reading that article, I have thought a lot about the role of libraries in our society. I have library cards for three different library systems here in Massachusetts. I joined the Boston Athenaeum, a membership library, last December after writing about them in a December 11th’s Weekly Review.

Libraries are important places. Digital technology cannot yet replace — and I hope never will — brick-and-mortar libraries.

I love going to physical libraries. I love browsing the stacks.

One afternoon while wandering through the shelves, I came across The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke a collection of fragments from Rilke’s letters, collected into thematic chapters by Ulrich Baer. Without the serendipity of walking through the stacks, I would never have found the book because I would never have thought to look for it.

I walked into the Boston Athenaeum on Saturday to visit again the art exhibit I reviewed last week, An Artist + A Poet. Walking around the new acquisitions displays on the first floor, I found Young Rilke and His Times by George C. Schoolfield. Again, I never would have thought to look for this book but I’m glad to have borrowed it.

That’s one weakness I find in my own Internet research. There is so much information out there, that unless I know what I am looking for, I have trouble finding anything at all. Reading from the Internet encourages us to read shallowly and seek a particular piece of information and continue on.

We have become sifters.

But when we enter a library, we are looking for knowledge in a broader sense than we are when we begin an Internet search. When we begin an Internet search, we are looking for answers to specific questions. When we enter a library, we are looking for answers, yes, but I think we are open to letting those answers inspire additional questions in ways we aren’t on the Internet.

All the same, I am no luddite. I know that the Internet is changing the way that we think and organize information. Perhaps libraries will become obsolete.

But I hope that we continue recognize the value of books and libraries. There are no pop-up advertisements in books, nor banner ads in libraries. Just as online, there are other things — more books, though, rather than more sites — vying for our attention in a library. Yet, I find myself able to become immersed in a book in a way that I have never seen translated online.

I hope that we keep these quiet bowers.

What are your thoughts? Share them with us.

Do libraries hold any special memories for you? Have you moved completely online? Do libraries have a future, or only a past?

In This Essay

Steppenwolf: A Novel by Hermann Hesse (Basil Creighton, trans.)

The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (Richard J. Finneran, ed.)

Don Juan in Hell: From Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw

Last night I finished rereading Steppenwolf. I had put it down for a while and flitted among the arts.

I know for certain I am in the middle of two other novels. But I think I may have forgotten that I am in the middle of any number of others.

The past few weeks have been filled with theatre and opera.

As if that were not enough, I have been reading from the poetry of Rumi, W.B. Yeats, and John Keats. In fact, I have been working on memorizing Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” I have the first stanza of ten lines memorized; only seventy lines left to commit to memory.

“Why are you spreading yourself so thin?” I asked myself earlier.

Castles Built in the Air

I looked at the stacks of books piled up around my room. Looking at my room, I could not stop thinking of the descriptions of Harry Haller’s room nor the scenes of Will Hunting’s room. I have towers and towers of precariously balanced books; so many that I spend much of my time at work worrying if my cats have knocked them over.

These towers of covers, these garrets of paper, these gates hinged with glue enclose a beautiful courtyard of thoughts and ideas.

But they are also doorways to the Magic Theater.

The Magic Theater: For Madmen Only

What is the Magic Theater?

This little theater of mine has as many doors into as many boxes as you please, ten or a hundred or a thousand, and behind each door exactly what you seek awaits you. It is a pretty cabinet of pictures, my dear friend; but it would be quite useless for you to go through it as you are. You would be checked and blinded at every turn by what you are pleased to call your personality. You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality.
–Pablo to Harry Haller in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, page 176.

Who has not had the desire to lay his personality, her self, aside for a few hours? Each of us, I believe, gets tired of the little dramas and games that occur in our day to day lives. We seek out the adventure and the relief of being someone else.

And this is why I am myself enmeshed in so many different books right now. I enjoy the intensity of Elena Ferrante’s characters who are both interior and self-aware while being bundles of chaos, drives, and impulses. But equally I enjoy the the relaxed stateliness of Jane Austen’s austere character dramas. I see myself as much in the personal poetry of John Keats as I do in the more affected poetry of W.B. Yeats.

The times that I most enjoy a book are those times when I can lose myself in a book. That is what Pablo is asking Harry to do on entering the Magic Theater. That is what so many of us do when we sit down with a book or in front of a television screen, when we enter a theater or a cinema.

Many great thinkers since the time of Socrates, if not before, have had their own variation on this theme. Socrates asks us why we run when what we run from is ourselves, the very thing we cannot escape through running. Seneca writes the same.

And Laughing Break the Mirror Sweet

And looking in the mirror, I asked myself again, “Why are you spreading yourself so thin?” And laughing, I realize it is because I want to escape for a little while from myself that I have spread myself so thin.

The mirror breaks.

And the image of myself dissolves. In my pocket I find a number of figures, each of them my self — each at least a sliver of self — that I can assemble into a number of different constellations. Some grow big, take on aspects that I do not recognize, while others recede, shrink away until they have almost disappeared.

I observe all this happening to me just as it happened to Harry.

The Wolf and the Scholar

As I was reading through Harry’s adventures in the Magic Theater, especially when he enters the box “All Girls Are Yours”, I found myself thinking of one of my favorite poems by W.B. Yeats.

The Scholars

Bald heads, forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

–W.B. Yeats

Early in the novel Harry became disillusioned at seeing someone else’s painting or bust of Goethe, thinking his own image of Goethe — because it was in his mind and not vulgarly committed to clay or canvas — was any less a graven image. He believed he inhabited a more rarefied air than his contemporaries until he began to find the sweetness of popular entertainments.

Throughout the book, Harry Haller realizes that he has made quite a hash of his own life by creating these false dichotomies between the high arts and the low arts. Within his soul, Harry under Hermine’s tutelage found that he could find as much enlightenment in dancing a foxtrot as he could in listening to Mozart.

The Great Divide

I do not wonder, though, that he makes the dichotomies that he does, however. This idea of the gulf is pervasive. Shaw speaks to it in Don Juan in Hell. The Devil says:

The gulf is the difference between the angelic and the diabolic temperament. What more impassable gulf could you have? Think of what you have seen on earth. There is no physical gulf between the philosopher’s class room and the bull ring; but the bull fighters do not come to the class room for all that.
– The Devil in George Bernard Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell, page 15.

Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which Harry hints at throughout the novel but does not cite by name until the end of his time in the Magic Theater, and much of Goethe’s poetry is in praise of life’s pleasures. Perhaps Harry took Don Giovanni’s punishment too much to heart. That Harry takes things outside of the Magic Theater too seriously and that he cannot become enlightened because he has no sense of humor are major themes of Steppenwolf.

Entering the Magic Theater, Harry begins to take things less seriously. Through the illusions and entertainments of the Magic Theater, he begins to learn. At the critical moment, though, he lapses into his past thoughts and forgets the good humor he has learned.

And so it is with us, is it not? We close a book or leave a movie, in good cheer, in good humor, thinking we have learned to be better people — more loving, more generous, and more good-humored — and then our old selves come crashing down on us.

Is there no hope, then? Harry will tell us:

I understood it all. I understood Pablo. I understood Mozart, and somewhere behind me I heard his ghastly laughter. I knew that all the hundred thousand pieces of life’s game were in my pocket. A glimpse of its meaning had stirred my reason and I was determined to begin the game afresh. I would sample its tortures once more and shudder again its senselessness. I would traverse not once more, but often, the hell of my inner being.

One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.

–Harry Haller in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, page 218.

What is the common phrasing of the Biblical proverb? “Seven years of feast, seven years of famine”?

Keeping in line with our rapidly shrinking sense of time and of being overwhelmed, when I look back on writing the Weekly Reviews, I feel like there are seven days of feast and seven days of famine.

This week has been a feast week. I emailed myself twenty-seven (27) stories for consideration for this week’s post. In fact, part of the reason why I did not post on Friday is because I had so much material to sort through.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Books Are Just Dead Trees
• The Lost Art of Reading
• Learning Takes Time
• Reminded of Mortality by Eating an Apple
• Single Parenting and Cognitive Development
• Mirror Writing

Books Are Just Dead Trees

• Openings, Jeffrey Hamburger, Boston University’s World of Ideas, WBUR via buworldofideas.org
• “My Kindle quandary”, Alison Lobron, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine via boston.com
• “The Book That Contains All Books”, Stephen Marche, The Wall Street Journal via online.wsj.com
• “Is this the end? : Some people think book publishing is in its final throes. The Boston Book Festival begs to differ.”, Joan Anderman, The Boston Globe, via boston.com
• Nook vs. Kindle: New Chapter In E-Reader Battle, All Things Considered, NPR, via npr.org

I love the physicality of books. The weight of one in my hands. The feel of my eyes moving across the page. The sound as I turn the page. Even, to some extent, the smell of a new book as much as that of an old, musty book.

And the Kindle, as well as other ereaders, are changing that.

I have been thinking about this for a while. In fact, the first two links above are from late September and mid October. But the news that the first annual Boston Book Festival was last weekend heartens me.

I believe there will always be a place for the physical book as we know it today. And I also believe that the ancient cultures that used scrolls said much the same. At some point, probably within my lifetime, ereaders will become the dominant way that most people interact with literature.

One thing that worries me about this is the stories and research that I’ve heard about, not cited above, that reading on a screen is more difficult than reading on a page. Do the ereaders with their e-ink technology address that? I remember one review of the Amazon Kindle that disparaged its dark grey on light grey interface. The Barnes&Noble Nook will have a color screen. But at the end, are they screens with refresh rates like computer monitors and screens?

Part of the experience of reading will be lost. I studied art history at Ohio Wesleyan University and I enjoyed altarpieces that opened. The church looked one way when the altarpiece was closed and no services were going on, another when services were provided. Jeffrey Hamburger in his lecture “Openings” talks about several medieval liturgical books and their meaning in religious art and religious services.

Professor Hamburger discusses the art of some of these books that encompassed the whole scene when a book was open, others that set things in opposition between right and left pages.

He also discusses how books engross us. When a book is open on my lap, it encompasses my whole field of view. There are no buttons on the bottom to distract me. I am afraid that just as multi-tasking on computers slowly erodes our ability to concentrate on longer works, so too will ereaders.

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The Lost Art of Reading

• “The lost art of reading” by David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times via latimes.com

Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.
–David L. Ulin

Not dissimilar to the articles I quote above, but I think deserving its own entry, is an article I discovered by David L. Ulin. I can’t quite remember how I found it, some Google search brought it up, perhaps when I was looking for articles related to the ones above.

I have been reading The 4-Hour Workweek, based on a review over at one of my favorite blogs, Get Rich Slowly. (Listen, when you work as a banker and spend all day with people who are working deals to make money quickly, it can be very relaxing to read about reasonable people who believe in budgeting, saving, and resisting impulse buying.) Timothy Ferriss in The 4-Hour Workweek argues that we micromanage our lives for the sake of feeling busy.

In some ways, David Ulin makes a similar argument. We have trouble immersing ourselves in books because our culture has become one of immediacy. We have lost the idea of cultivation. There is a meditative aspect of reading that brings us back to ourselves because of the space it gives us from the present, as well as giving us new thoughts with which to approach the present.

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Learning Takes Time

• “‘Baby Einstein’ Videos Ineffective, Study Finds”, Day to Day, NPR, via npr.org
• “Can You Make Your Baby Smarter, Sooner?”, Talk of the Nation, NPR, via npr.org
• “No Einstein in Your Crib? Get a Refund” by Tamar Lewin, The New York Times via nytimes.com
• The Baby Einstein^TM DVD Guarantee

You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.
–Warren Buffett

In the same vein, you cannot speed up the cognitive development of your child by sitting them down in front of a television. In fact, some suggest that doing so may actually have the reverse effect.

Human beings are social animals. We have grown and developed throughout time in families, tribes, and other groups. When we sit a child in front of a television, we are cutting them off from that connection and teaching them from a very young age that sitting in front of a screen is preferable to interacting with other people.

Disney is refunding money to people who bought Baby Einstein videos. The videos “have been discredited, redirecting emphasis on the importance of interaction between parents and babies for proper development.” The offer from Baby Einstein^TM

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Reminded of Mortality by Eating an Apple

Michael Doyle writes a very personal blog post here, about eating apples. I had never thought of apples, specifically, as a memento mori — another Latin phrase you think you know — but now I’m not sure I’ll ever look at an apple quite the same way.

I have linked to Michael Doyle’s Science Teacher previously, in a Weekly Review a few weeks back. He’s got an excellent blog on teaching and life. You should all take a look.

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Single Parenting and Cognitive Development

• This Is Your Brain Without Dad by Shirley S. Wang, The Wall Street Journal via online.wsj.com
• Wikipedia Article on Degus

A German biologist, Dr. Anna Katharina Braun, studied a Chilean rodent, the degu, which is normally raised by two parents. She removed the father degu and studied the impact on brain development of the pups.

She found that the pups deprived of a father had less dense neuronal brain connections when the pups were 21 days old. The fatherless pups did gain some density by the time they were 90 days old, considered adulthood in this species, but there were still differences in the brains.

Although I do not like the emphasis on the heterogeneity of parents in this article, I was intrigued by the findings:

• “A preliminary analysis of the degus’ behavior showed that fatherless animals seemed to have a lack of impulse control, Dr. Braun says. And, when they played with siblings, they engaged in more play-fighting or aggressive behavior.”
• “In a separate study in Dr. Braun’s lab conducted by post-doctoral researcher Joerg Bock, degu pups were removed from their caregivers for one hour a day. Just this small amount of stress leads the pups to exhibit more hyperactive behaviors and less focused attention, compared to those who aren’t separated, Dr. Braun says. They also exhibit changes in their brain.”

If I’m reading one sentence right, degu parents spend about equal amounts of time with their children and the single mothers did not compensate. The scientists are attributing the decreased neuronal density to the loss of time with a parent. If the degus were raised by two mothers or two fathers who spent equivalent amounts of time with the children, what would the neuronal density look like?

So, if the important factor is the amount of time spent rearing children, then different family structures can all raise healthy children. They need to compensate for any loss of time as they are able. I would love to see more research on this that included the role of extended families, such as uncles, aunts, and grandparents.

At the end of the article, they discuss the impact of single family parenting on IQ scores. I have written elsewhere, in a few different posts, that IQ is one metric but that there are other factors in determining a children’s success than their IQ scores.

Part of what determines success is impulse control and the ability to delay gratification. The research indicates that fatherless degu pups have trouble control. If we were sure that carried over to humans, we would have a lot to worry about.

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Mirror Writing

• Writing about writing by Floyd Skloot, The Boston Globe via boston.com

I have not read anything by John Irving. But now I want to read his 12th novel, Last Night in Twisted River.

One topic I touched on briefly in Sailing with Rumi — very briefly, in fact, I think it was just two sentences — is one of my personal interests: where was the writer end and the narrator begin? The review suggests that that is at the heart of this novel. John Irving writes enough parallels between himself and the novel’s Danny Angel that we are able to have this argument along with John Irving.

The metafictional, self-reflexive business is in part a tease. While inviting a reader to focus on autobiographical elements, it allows Irving, in the voice of Angel, to protest the way his “fiction had been ransacked for every conceivably autobiographical scrap’’ and “dissected and overanalyzed for whatever could be construed as the virtual memoirs hidden inside them.
–Floyd Skloot

What does it take for a man or a woman to engage the world through the written word? Writers take their individual life experiences and try to find the universals to which others can relate.

Literature is entertainment but equally connection. It provides us a sense of continuity, a sense of community through the opportunity to discover that we are not alone because others have either experienced or imagined what we have gone through.

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