With silly attitudes towards libraries in the news lately and having recently lived through the hottest day of my life so far, I find myself thinking about another benefit of libraries: they're a place where everyone is allowed to be. Not just where everyone is allowed to go, but where everyone is allowed to be.
If you want to hang out in Tim Hortons, you need to buy a coffee. If you want to hang out in the mall food court, they can kick you out for loitering if they want. But you are allowed - and in fact welcome - to hang out in the library for as long as you want. It's climate-controlled, there are comfy seats, there's psychological privacy (you're in an open room, but people generally mind their own business, and no one will think it's strange if you find an inconspicuous nook somewhere and hide there), and there are no rules about what you should be doing apart from not disturbing others. You don't have to be doing schoolwork, you don't have to be using library materials, you don't have to be doing something serious or important, you don't even have to be awake. You're just allowed to be there, for as long as it's open, doing your own thing.
It's very easy to forget how important this is when you're in a position of privilege. I myself don't hang out at the library that often, I tend to just swoop in, pick up my books, and go home. But that's because home is a comfy, internet-equipped, air-conditioned apartment that I have all to myself. Not everyone has that privilege. If home is too crowded or noisy or uncomfortable or abusive or non-existent, having somewhere else to go - a perfectly respectable place to go and to be (compare the connotations of spending hours in the library vs. spending hours in the bar) - can be a lifesaver. And once you're there, it's full of tools for educating and improving yourself or, worst case, quietly amusing yourself.
And despite the fact that it's of such value to the most marginalized people, it is not by any means charity. It's something literally everyone uses.
3 comments:
So, so, so true. It is truly public space. I love this so much.
Wonderful piece.
Public libraries have often been refuges for me. I spent many many days in the Boston Public Library's old reading room and its quiet, vaulted ceilings, vertical slit windows, marble, murals, Windsor chairs, and pneumatic tubes taking book call requests down to the stacks all became part of my inner architecture.
I must say, however, that I've given up taking out books from public libraries, though I still use the Maine State catalog at school to order books through interlibrary loan--when my local public library de-accessioned its collections to the point where they had more Joanna than Anthony Trollope, I started to 'check out,' so to speak.
That's unfortunate. I've always been impressed with how responsive my library is to acquisition requests, so I can imagine how much it would suck if that stopped.
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