The following post is part of a Seed Pod collaboration about libraries. Seed Pods are a SmallStack community project designed to help smaller publications lift each other up by publishing and cross-promoting around a common theme. We’re helping each other plant the seeds for growth!
What I remember most vividly is the subtle physical shift in my body as I cross the threshold. Limbs move with a greater awareness, my heart rate accelerates slightly. I fizz with a mix of anxiety, excitement and impatience. The air around me thickens with the woody smell of cellulose slowly decaying, changing how I breathe.
Ahead of me are stacks of books. I might have ascended the steps of the Brotherton library at the University of Leeds, slipping between the neoclassical columns, heels rapping the polished wooden floors and emerging, finally, beneath the great art deco dome. From here, I go upstairs to the art section or descend to the basement. This was the university’s humanities library and I’d spend hours going up and down four floors between art, philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, linguistics, history, gathering books like bouquets of wild flowers.
But really, I get the same feeling in any library from the British Library to our tiny local library that still smells the same as when I visited as a child.
There is just so much possibility here. So much choice. So many worlds I won't live long enough to enter.
In shadows, with a tentative stick, I try
the hollow twilight, slow and imprecise—
I, who had always thought of Paradise
In form and image as a library.
In his 1958 ‘Poem of the Gifts’ Jorge Luis Borges writes of his progressive blindness, that began not long after his appointment as director of the National Library of Argentina. But those first lines in the above extract describe my own process in the stacks.
***
The classroom is a place of possibility too. For the most part, I teach online nowadays and have done since all classes suddenly pivoted in 2020. It's opened up education to those who previously found it inaccessible and brings together people from around the world in an affordable manner.
Yet there are many subtle possibilities which are lost in the absence of physical presence and togetherness on the university campus. It's impossible to clock a wrinkle of apprehension crossing a student’s face in an online classroom. There is no reassuring ripple of nods when I finally find the right way to convey a tricky concept. The subtle electricity that shudders through a seminar room when a discussion really finds its rhythm doesn’t find its way through a Wifi connection. When this happens, the mood elevates and students gain a glimpse of the impact that they have on the work of their professors, they see that knowledge is collaborative, that good teaching is as much about being a willing learner.
So much good pedagogy happens in possibility, in the unplanned. In the gathering together.
The same is true in the library. Students without access to, or who don’t take advantage of, a physical library suffer for it. When I speak to student now all their searches are targeted.
As libraries and bookshops move online, our ability to browse becomes restrained. We already know that social media uses algorithms to direct us to information it believes will hold our attention, which closes us tighter into ourselves, onto ourselves. I can flick through a broadsheet, voraciously nibbling on current affairs. On the internet, we read what already interests us, what is presented to us.
There are fewer accidents.
And you can’t browse an online catalogue like you can a library shelf. The processes can begin the same. An author, a topic, a search engine. In the physical world, you note the reference location, walk through the library, meander through shelving units scanning titles, authors, and reference numbers. Your eye might run over a title that elicits a jolt of possible interest. You pull it out and another book is tightly packed in next to it. You turn both over in your hands, evaluate their applicability and the time you have to whatever deadline you are working to. Then calculate their utility in that moment. Maybe both go back on the shelf. But maybe not. And a new possibility opens up.
***
It is the tips of my fingers running across the spines of books that I think I missed the most during lockdowns. Looking for the book I thought I needed, and, in doing so, finding the books that I actually need.
It is this possibility which I mourn the most. It is the reminder that sometimes I don't know what I need until I find it wedged between what I don't need.
Sometimes, a serendipitous encounter like this can alter the course of a life. It did mine.
***
My life was changed by an accidental discovery on a bookshelf. I remember the moment distinctly. I was a graduate student figuring out my interests in Asian arts and cultural theory. I was at Leeds University’s other library -the Edward Boyle - which housed the STEM subjects. It has less architectural grandeur, but I appreciated its utilitarian brutalist structure, all concrete and glass. One of the floors also contained the university’s collections of short loan books . The book that I thought I needed for my essay was here, in the theology stacks. As I searched for it with my fingers and my eyes, I found myself pausing at a thin volume with its spine still uncracked.
I pulled it out and this chance encounter changed the direction of my life.
The book was called Darsan, by Diana E. Eck. I was writing about phenomenology and haptic encounters between bodies and artworks, exploring western philosophical ideas about seeing and touching. Yet, Merleau-Ponty and the rest of his gang only took me so far. I was also taking a class with Professor Ashley Thompson, which was ostensibly on Buddhist art but which at its core was asking if it is ever possible to step outside of one’s own subjectivity. I was thirsty for the intellectual challenges presented with each seminar.
Vision is crucial in Buddhism and perhaps I was looking for a book for her class. I must have thought this slim, paperback was unintimidating enough to add it to my pile. It’s subtitle is Seeing the Divine Image in India. Clearly, it might be applicable to my essay.
The text wasn’t as dense as the other books I’d been reading, although the concept it was describing is complex. There was white space on the page (so much happens in the silences and empty spaces). From the first pages I was hooked. Here was a scopic regime so different from my own, but which was integral to ways of seeing and thinking about art in Indic contexts. The book presented a theory and a practice, and perhaps a methodology. It posed fundamental questions to this art historian. Without realizing it, the book I had plucked from the shelf was describing haptic, epistemological, ritualised encounters between people and statues, although in the Hindu case the statues are not representations, they are instantiations of the gods themselves.
Darsan is a Sanskrit term which literally means ‘to see’. But it specifically relates to an exchange of vision between a believer and a deity, in both Hinduism and Buddhism. Darsan describes the devotee seeing the deity and, in this moment, the vision animates the deity, bringing their presence into the statue which is being looked at. This allows the deity to look back, to see the devotee.
But darsan also translates as philosophy. The English term ‘philosophy’ is rooted in ‘love of knowledge’, whereas darsan specifically connects vision to knowledge. To see is to know. In the West, aesthetics (seeing) is a sub-category of philosophy, but in the Indian context it is arguably all philosophy is an aesthetical philosophy.
***
I wrote about darsan in my essay. It was a curveball, a mad mish-mash of ideas. My professor was pleased. Something changed with that essay. She showed me a temple in Cambodia, a place she lived for many, many years and whose culture she was an expert. It took a while to truly see (know) what she was showing me.
I decided to write my dissertation on the basis of this book, calling it Darsan: Sight, Image and Selfhood. It was madcap. It divided opinions. But it earned me a distinction.
Professor Thompson invited me to a conference in Cambodia and helped me find funding to pay for the flight. When arrived in Siem Reap, the town closest to the vast temple complexes that comprised Angkor, she immediately took me on a bike ride to some of the earliest temples. Then we sat in small modern-day Buddhist vat, legs crossed, sweat beading on my face. Later, she drove me out to see the temple she’d be showing me for months. I was instantly hooked.
Six months later I was living and working in Cambodia and drafting a PhD proposal. Over a decade later, I’m no closer to figuring out what darsan means for my discipline but I know it fundamentally changed my relationship to it. And it radically altered the course of my life in the best kinds of ways.
***
There is a ritual precision to darsan, but it is also happenstance. Deliberate action with intended but perhaps uncontrollable consequences. Like browsing that allows for the possibilities of accident. The accident is less possible when our reading is only online. What the eye cannot touch, the hand cannot reach, and our minds cannot go into the unexpected spaces between the spine of the book that is wedged next to the book we thought we wanted to read.
It is we are less comfortable with the unexpected? My doctoral proposal was full of interdisciplinary-this and transhistorical-that, the kind of moving between disciplines which I was free to do in the library but unable to do across departments.
Something has been lost in this culture of online access, where we have less possibility of browsing and happenstance.
Less ability to graze.
Cows have bigger mouths and are less discerning with what they pull up from the ground with their tongues. Sheep on the other hand have smaller and more discerning mouths, cutting vegetation with their front teeth which allows them to be more selective. Both know what they are looking for but each pull out green matter in different ways.
We need to graze bookshelves like a cow and a sheep. We need to browse and allow ourselves to be somewhat blind and tentatively poke at the shelves and what they contain. To follow our gut and see where it leads us.
One chance encounter could change everything.
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I loved this post! I was there beside you as you stepped into the library, and followed you through the story! Yes, I also love browsing, grazing in libraries (and bookstores), always finding something unexpected I didn't know I needed. I agree with you, this is not possible online.
"It is the reminder that sometimes I don't know what I need until I find it wedged between what I don't need." ❤️ My favorite way to find a new book is grazing the library! Thanks for sharing your story.