Libraries blessed with grace

       

I’ve been amazed (and happy) to see how many books and feature articles (fiction and nonfiction) are available these days on the topic of libraries.

The Christian Century recently carried a lengthy piece by Yale graduate student Margaret Kearney on the Brooklyn Public Library, and I found myself wrapped in reading two novels, The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, and The Last Chance Library by Freya Sampson.

Kearney grabs our attention with her opening observation that the Brooklyn library is like the kingdom of heaven. What it has it must freely give away. She writes that seen from above, the central branch of the library resembles an open book; and from the front steps, it looks like a temple.

This ties in neatly with an October editorial by Peter Marty in The Christian Century in which he describes the New York Public Library’s decision to end fines and late fees as an “act of grace.” A gracious institutional move on the part of an enormous library reaching out into a sometimes ungracious world. 

Marty suggests that the idea behind a public library is that no one, regardless of background or circumstance, should have to face an access barrier when it comes to reading. Grace, he says, was never meant be an exclusively religious word devoid of all meaning in the wider culture.

In her article in the Century, Margaret Kearney recalls the observation of Francie, the young protagonist in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, who says of her own neighborhood library: “The feeling she had about it was as good as the feeling she had about church.”

Although less metaphysical, Freya Sampson’s novel is about an assistant in a British village library that is threatened with closure. The librarian teams up with regular quirky patrons to keep the place open, at the same time fighting to come out of her shell and live a happy life of education, travel, and romance. In the process she discovers that a library can be more than a place where people borrow books.

Matt Haig’s novel  poses the question: What if you had the chance to live out every version of your life that was ever possible? Would you still be wishing you could have done things differently?

It describes the library visits of a woman in her mid-thirties, Nora, who explores many of the alternate life-paths she left behind in favor of others.

After experiencing what could have been, Nora realizes one simple truth: [spoiler alert] the only life she could ever be satisfied with living, is hers, and all the choices she once classified as regrets are actually blessings in disguise—“a truth she was now proud of and pleased with, a truth she had not only come to terms with but welcomed openly, with every fiery molecule of her being.”

Which takes me back to one of my own blessings in disguise, the Tremont Street branch of the Boston Public Library.

When I left Boston a year ago, I realized that that library is not only run by the warmest, friendliest people you could ever wish to meet, but how much I loved the way they filled their front garden every April with joyful displays of daffodils and tulips over a front-door sign bearing an unmistakable message: BE KIND.

Another library, one might say,  blessed with grace.