Why visit a library if you’ve got Google at your fingertips? In this thoughtful essay, Charles Digges reflects on the services and experiences that libraries have given us over the decades, and how today’s libraries—and librarians—still offer things that a search bar can’t: Community and connection with people IRL. The space to be curious. The chance to discover the unexpected, free from an all-seeing eye. But Digges does so in a way that doesn’t pit the library against the internet, nor does he dwell on or romanticize our analog past.
But what if it hadn’t been so simple? What if—instead of having my screen cluttered instantly with infinite reproductions of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks—I was forced to live in a period of contemplation? Of not knowing? Might that have generated a spark of curiosity?
If so, I might have found my way to the library. And while there, I might have stumbled on a good deal more about Nighthawks and its enigmatic portrayal of urban loneliness—as, once upon a time, as a Midwestern kid longing for a life in the big city, I did within the stacks at the Iowa City Public Library. There, I followed the streets of Hopper’s metropolis to the stories of John Cheever and Ralph Ellison, their characters often under the spell of Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, whose records I checked out. I could step backward, too, following Hopper’s urban themes to Degas and Manet—their gamines encountered with the longing felt in the pages of Proust.
The fact that eBooks can only be read by one patron at a time puts me back in an approximation of a public space. It reminds me that there is another human being somewhere in this city who shares a curiosity with me. We may never meet, but as I place a hold on the material we’re both interested in, I am acknowledging some sort of physical finitude—a democratic compact to share a limited resource. This is not a typical digital experience where the world—and our searches—are available for a price.
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