The Providence Public Library is a grandiose pile of masonry on the corner of Empire and Washington downtown. I went in a few times in the late 1970s, but it seemed very hoi polloi to me. (What a nasty little snob I was in those days!)
Also, I was entering that phase in my life in which it was important that I own books rather than just borrow them.
Thirty-five years have passed, and my home bookshelves are groaning with books, loved and unloved, read and unread.
And a few months ago, for some reason, I don’t know why, I went back to the Providence Public Library.
And I fell in love with the place.
Let me tell you first that it’s open for less than forty hours a week. It opens at 12:30pm four days a week, which is a crime against humanity. I didn’t know that when I first started going there; I got there around 12:15pm one day, and was surprised to see a line of people waiting to get in. And do you know why most of them were there? To use the small bank of public-use computers. By the intense look on their faces, they were job-hunting. What does that tell you about the usefulness of the public library?
The other sections of the library – the reference stacks, the reading rooms, the music rooms – are very quiet. Well, maybe “quiet” is a stupid word to use about a library. Let us say instead: deserted.
Which is itself a sin and a shame.
But I have to admit I enjoyed it.
I wandered into the fiction section as if by instinct. I was the only person for miles, amid racks and racks of books, acres and acres of books, with that musty elementary-school smell all around me. Do you remember those crackly plastic covers that library books always had when we were in school? They still have them.
I got my bright blue library card that very first day. I have been back at least once a week, and I get such pleasure out of it. I return my last week’s reading in the little basket, and I wander light-headed through the stacks.
And I’m borrowing them! I’ve finally gotten away from the idea that I have to own books! I used to love the idea that I owned them, they were mine, I could keep them on a shelf and pull them down anytime I wanted to . . .
Sometime around the ten-thousandth book, this stopped making sense.
Let’s face it: ultimately we own nothing, not our homes nor our cars, not even our precious books, not even ourselves.
We can only ever borrow things and use them for a while.
And maybe libraries are a perfect expression of that.
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