I have a strangely cosmic relationship with my local library.
I dare say we are friends, mutually receptive to each other’s needs. I tiptoe through her knowledge; she promises me a secret for my silence.
The difference between borrowing a book from the library and buying one from a large store makes me realize how devoted I am to living a more hushed life; a more library-valuing life.
Stores are businesses, reliant on financial exchanges, making everything set up to play to my sense of deficiency. In comparison, the library is rooted in nonchalance. It has a kind of take-it-or-leave-it attitude that doesn’t promise or deny me anything.
My faithfulness to my local library lies in its aloofness, in its quiet indifference to what is going on in the outside world. It never feels the need to compete with a system that is self-cannibalizing.
The need for less quietly overtakes me once in a while. And every time I feel the murmuring waters around me rise to a deafening crescendo, I return to poetry. Or poetry returns to me. It’s like letting the bathwater out.
Why I ever leave, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s my own need to be known; a momentary forgetfulness that I am already seen and heard unto myself.
