full circle

[the_siobhan]

I went to the library today.

Some of the people on my f-list will be shocked and appalled at this news; but it's true, gentle readers. I have not set foot in a library except to use the photocopier since I graduated from University, some 15 years ago.

The Toronto Reference Library was built in the '70's and you can really tell when you walk inside. It's all curved space and glass conference rooms and big open atrium all carpeted in earth tones. There's even a waterfall in the very back by the staircase, the sound of which makes me have to pee immediately I walk in the door.

Of course the area of the main floor that used to be taken up with rows and rows of card catalogues is now full of computers. And so progress marches on.

I browsed for a little while before I went and copied the material I had gone there to find. Picking books off the shelves and leafing through them reminded me of something markeris said when he was here, that there is a very different part of the brain used by reading words from a book than there is from reading them from a computer screen or a newspaper. That theory really resonated with me. it felt like a true thing, that the physical act of lifting the page, of scanning the words on a paper surface, would engage slightly different synapses or engage the same synapses in a different way than the act of reading those same words on a lit background.

For one thing, I find the urge to use the word "asshat" arises with much less frequency.

When I was a kid I read every single book in the children's section and got written permission from my parents to check out books in the adult shelves. When I hit high school I read every book in the fiction room by the end of first year, by the end of third year I had finished every non-fiction book on any subject that interested me and was working there after school.

Now I mostly read textbooks of one kind or another. Reading for the simple enjoyment of it has been relegated to spare time I never seem to find.

I think that's a loss. So I made a promise to myself that I would be back.

Before I left, I got myself a library card.

Comments

[razorjak.livejournal.com]

I'm going to miss the Buffalo Library system. I've never lived more than a mile from a library since I moved here.

When I was a kid, there were many days in which the library was my babysitter. I was allowed to walk from school to the library and read until my mom picked me up around 5:30 or 6.

I tell people of that and they think my folks were irresponsible. Fuck man, I grew up in a town were that shit was SAFE to do.

[melete.livejournal.com]

I used to do the same thing. But I also lived near in the middle of nowhere in a place where _nothing_ ever happened. We would bike everywhere after school. Most days were spent in the library.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I used to do the same. Half the time they'd have to come and get me.

[50-ft-queenie.livejournal.com]

Irresponsible to hang out in a library? Hell, them my parents were the most irresponsible people on earth. I spent damn near every weekend afternoon at the library, and several evenings after school too.

[razorjak.livejournal.com]

Yeah I know. I take their comments with a grain of salt because they are the type of parents who putting 30 pounds of padding on their kid before he can skateboard ... in the driveway only. He's not allowed to go on the sidewalk.

[kest]

The kids in oakland do that. And they sit there and chatter and mess around with the games on their cell phones and eat cheetos and the librarian yells at them to shut up and it makes me shake my fist like an old person.