If, as a librarian, I allow myself some time to muse about libraries, it is only fitting that I begin with reference to the great Library at Alexandria in Egypt, which is believed to have been instituted by Ptolemy II, pharaoh and basileus of the Ptolemaic Kingdom, sometime in the 3rd century BCE. It formed part of the Mouseion, a place dedicated to the Muses. At its height, it is said to have contained up to 400,000 papyrus scrolls.
At their best, libraries, of whatever size and grandeur, are repositories of the human endeavour to know about our world, about ourselves, and to imagine and speculate about what we do not know. Arnold Ranneris, without whom our Meeting House Library would not exist as it does, felt that the purpose of a library was best expressed by words he had seen on a poster: “The Spirit of God may emerge from the pages of a book to take wings in the life of a reader.” In a passage that appears in Faith and Practice of Canadian Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, he writes, “Since our unprogrammed meetings do not have teaching sermons, a heavy responsibility lies with each person to learn on her own; faith is a maturing process that must go on all of one’s life. Reading thoughtfully somehow sensitizes a person and broadens and sharpens his perception and awareness. Good books seem to hold a mirror up to us, and we see ourselves in reflection in a different light.”
The books in a library form an odd kind of community, for though the books stand shoulder to shoulder and shelf upon shelf, they are their own, individual selves, as are we, who wander amongst them looking for a special one-on-one contact. We choose one or two or three and take them home to visit for a few weeks, giving each one its own special time with us. For those minutes or hours we sit and read a book, we step outside of one world to enter another; we step outside our “normal” time and space to experience someone else’s. “Camerado,” writes Walt Whitman in his poem “So Long” from Leaves of Grass, “this is no book, / Who touches this touches a man.” And John Milton, in his Areopagitica: “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”
I’m sure you’ve had the experience of being deeply engrossed in a book, when your roommate or some other human calls you or taps you on the shoulder and you feel that jarring moment of disorientation when you’re caught between two worlds, not quite sure how to make the transition from the one in the book, where you’ve been, to the one where your roommate is standing, the one you had temporarily left behind.
As libraries go, our Meeting House Library is, perhaps, a minor affair. But it is our affair. It offers us spiritual direction and nourishment, challenge and stimulation, respite and comfort, if we would but take the hand it reaches out to us.