On Browsing and Serendipity
Why a library visit changed the course of my life
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.