I love
libraries. Everything about them. The feel of an old, dusty
hardback in your hand? The staggering realization that herein lay thousands of
books you'll never read, places and lives and thoughts and people you'll never know? The cute
girl in glasses behind the desk? I want it all, baby. Oh yeah.
There's a
romance about these places. You walk in and you find yourself surrounded by The Collective Human Knowledge from Generations Back and you can't help but feel a touch tiny in that bright glare. But it's...and this isn't going to make much sense...a
good tiny. It's like walking into a roomful of benevolent, godlike giants: each one bearing a boon for the adventurer. You merely have to ask, listen, think!...
Card catalogs are a bitch and a half, even online ones. There, I've said it. Lynch-mobs, hold your
effigies and torches and
pitchforks down for a bit; let me finish, alright? I hate that college libraries have different systems than public libraries, and I don't exactly like no one bothers to hang those delightful little posters that break down the
Dewey Decimal System for you anymore (500s are 'natural sciences and mathematics? How was I supposed to know that one, again?). At Georgetown, we put our fiction right next to their commentaries. This sounds like a splendid idea...until you realize that the commentaries aren't actually written by the author. So guess what? 'Alpha-by-author' doesn't exist anymore! Let's instead invent this batshit insane system involving multiple codes with delightfully opaque meanings like 'PQ' and 'PM' and 'PR!'. Oh and let's only do this for fiction, let's leave all the rest of the stuff alone to confuse the poor science majors who
occasionally like to read a bad-ass book or two.
But those irritations only make the final reward that much greater. I pulled from the shelf three copies of Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness: a story I've had recommended to me by more people than I can count. And I leafed through them, comparing the quality of the paper and whatnot, and then I discovered something strange. And very, very cool.
See, a bunch of people must've used these copies as their in-class texts since there was highlighting and numbering and notes and arrows and doohickeys all over the place. It was maddeningly strange to look at: suddenly, the words of the story had grown legs and arms, fleshy bits all over where once was mere
skeleton! And it's awesome, because since each copy was used by a different person, each of the notes had their own style. One guy put lecture summaries on the inside of the jacket and the blank pages in-between. Pretty wild stuff, too: something about
Plato and
Aristotle and
Marlow and
Hobbes (didn't have time to read it all). And his in-text notes kept relating back to these ideas. Someone else used, exclusively, a sloppy hot-pink highlighter, which ended up covering most of the words and made all the colored parts seem like someone was shouting it at you. The last guy had crisp, sharp underlines in pencil and pen: all writing in the margins was simple. Terse.
I'm hoping for one of them to include little jokes and doodles and cartoons and the like. I didn't see any of that, but I'll be sure to keep my eye out for some of that as I browse through my copy (I picked the first guy. He seemed like the most 'real' out of any of them, and I'm really interested in what he has to say). I love the connection I have with him. Or her. She could be in
Alaska doing research on ice-floe melting rates or a soccer mom in
Indiana or teaching my
Calculus II course. We could be separated by half a century, but connected through this little book. I'm looking at it right now. It's sitting on my roommate's bed (he left for the summer, lucky bastard), and it's almost like the thing has become animate. I know the person who marked up my book. Or, at least, I know a part of them they probably didn't expect anyone else to find, much less care about.
I pray I see jokes and doodles and witticisms and songs and poems and secret admissions and declarations of steadfast beliefs. And maybe I'll feel kind of dirty for reading something like that (there is such a thing as too personal, even over such a ridiculous form of communication as this), and maybe I won't. And maybe if I'm super extra special lucky, I'll find a note from the note-taker addressed to me. For maybe, indeed, the person whose copy of
Heart of Darkness is on my bed was expecting me. He'll never know my face but he'd have known that in ten or twenty or thirty years someone's gonna stumble upon his text and notes and he'll have left something for them to find. Maybe it'll make me reconsider a long-held goal. Maybe it'll launch me on a life-changing adventure to lands unknown.
Guess I better start reading.
I think I'll be using this library to supply all my texts from now on. And I think I'll anticipate the next reader, and I'll leave him notes and jokes and doodles and life. It might be ten or twenty or thirty years before anybody reads that. But someone will.
Next time you check out a library book...write in it. Leave a message for the explorer, for the amateur biblio-archaeologist in all of us. I'll be there on the other end, waiting to read your words and to understand who you are.
This is really similar in tone to my warriding writeup, moreso than I initially thought. Maybe I just look for meaning in all the wrong places.