A Mind in a Library

While watching an episode of Criminal Minds (a show clearly written by ex- English graduate students) I came across a quotation from Carl Jung. It wasn't one of the opening/closing quotations, but Rossi tells Reid (via Jung) that our choice of vocation is linked to our childhood and/or unconscious.

So. . . I grew up in a library, and became a Scholar in Literature. It seems so obvious, so simple. Books = book career.

It's so much more complicated than that. Why not become a librarian? A book-artist? A typesetter? An editor? An English teacher? And for each of those things, there's an external answer. I worked in a library for sixteen years, several of those as a librarian of one kind or another. I am very interested in book arts. I've tried data entry and word processing. Editing is my second job. English teacher (of a sort) is my first. I am, to some extent, all of those things. And the reason I am working for a PhD is also external: my grandfather got one, and when he died when I was seven, I said, "I want one, too." Just a kid, imitating a man I'd only met twice, and who showed no personal interest in me.

I grew up around books - piles of them, stacks of them, shelves upon shelves of them. The form, the heft, (the smell!) holds a fascination for me, but not one as strong as my fascination with words. My dad collects books. He completes series, the way he finished our family - four girls, four boys. Symmetrical and complete, though I believe that "complete" was infinitely more important to him than symmetry: they just happened, in this instance, to coincide. My dad didn't just buy books to put them on the shelves in neat, height-ordered rows: he curated them, he libraried them, and he read them. He spent whole years of our childhoods reading silently to himself, and very often aloud to us, too. Even now, I cannot see the words of The Hobbit, The Sword of Shannara, or Om, The Secret of Ahbor Valley without hearing them in his rich, tenor cadence.

In Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, the narrator's father is the library's janitor who walks the aisles with his broom, "mounding fallen spices." Despite the commodity value of a hardback, first-edition, or out-of-print text, the real flavor is inside. We bestow sentimental value on our marginalia'd paperbacks, and hate to replace them when the spines disintegrate, but we cannot reclaim the melted-snowflake moments of seeing those worlds for the first time. There will always be snow, but it will never taste quite like that again.

It is a commonly known fact among nerd-girls, that snuggling up with a good book is every much as comforting as a mug of cocoa, or a nap under a down duvet, though these activities often markedly coincide, especially in rainy or winter months. A book is warm, and kindles fanciful and rare passions. Even a badly-made example can be as welcoming as a best friend, and nerd-girls also know that best friends are also not perfectly-made either. It's not about perfection; it's about fit. We don't befriend the prettiest girls; we find the "old friends [we've] just met." You don't snuggle "with" a good book, you curl up inside it and pull the sheets over your head.

Writers will tell you that people are complicated, but characters are simple. I find this true, but insufficient. People are emergent, not chaotic or entropic. They behave, around me at least, not predictably but always in character, even if (bless them that changeth) that character is dynamic. People never surprise me because surprise is part of their standard operating paradigm. I understand people, but I never quite feel one of them. To be self-conscious is to be alienated. Books operate differently because they are designed with the understanding that you, the reader, are alien. There is no pressure to conform inside a book, only to watch what happens. We are expected to sympathize, but it is not required. We do not need to act, yet, only absorb. Acting comes later, as the quadrillionth ripple of the thoughts nudged by the words written by the godlike author.

So, as a small child standing in the library, looking up at my father's innumerable secondhand treasures, I wanted two things: I wanted to be inside the books. I wanted to feel at home among them in a way I never could among people and their impossible expectations. And I wanted to be a book, to be read, to be written on, to be told what I meant. I wanted my father's time.