Prospero: “…my library
Was Dukedom large enough…”
(Shakespeare The Tempest)
I have always loved libraries. I have always envied librarians. I think it likely that they have the best job in the world. Just the look of so many books all in one place is good for the soul. Those tiers upon tiers of books speak of civilization and the triumph of the better part of man – just as the sacking of the great library at Alexandria in ancient times has reverberated down through the ages as a symbol for the triumph of vandalism over intellect. Where so many books congregate, there is quietness and the fruits of thought more valuable by far than the most abundant gold.
Libraries of one sort or another have given infinite instruction, pleasure, and inspiration through the centuries. Most institutions created by man – governments, courts of law, even churches – can be given an evil twist. But whoever heard of an evil library? Even when the terrible day comes when modern technology has succeeded in computerizing all reading material for easy reference, I cannot imagine a world without books, a world without the values that libraries well stocked with beautifully produced books represent. If that day ever comes it will be a new Dark Age whatever the technologists say. I pray that there will always remain a few, like those who tended the great monastic libraries through the dead years in mediaeval Europe, who will treasure books and therefore seek to preserve them and never let libraries die.
Think of libraries! There are all kinds and degrees from the smallest village library to the great libraries of the world. All in their own way are monuments to man’s unending quest to create civilization and raise himself towards the angels. All are precious. There are lending libraries. There are libraries where people read and browse. There are libraries for students. There are libraries famous for their research facilities where scholars flock. There are libraries where whole books have been written – it was Samuel Johnson who said that often a man has to “turn over half a library to make one book.” There are libraries which have nurtured revolutions – those who begot the French revolution were great library goers and it is well known that Karl Marx wrote his world-shaking treatises mostly in the Reading Room of the British Museum Library. Libraries are places where one can be quiet and soothe the spirit out of the hectic rush of life. The writer Scott-Fitzgerald even thought a library was the best place to recover from a hangover: in his book The Great Gatsby he has the hero saying: “I’ve been drunk for about a week now and I thought it would sober me up to sit in a library.” I suppose the best and most satisfying library is one’s own collection – the books you buy through a lifetime and treasure and return to time and time again. But not many, especially in a poor country like Guyana, can afford to build up a substantial personal library. And, failing that, the public library – staffed with dedicated people and well funded – can be a very good second best indeed. The striving poor, those born with no silver spoons in their mouths, will always benefit most from public libraries. Those in authority, especially in this centenary year of our National Library should never allow themselves to forget that.
My first library was in St Augustine where my mother used to borrow boys’ adventure stories for me every week. Then when I went to school there were the Port of Spain libraries where I began to develop a more sophisticated love of reading. I remember as if it was yesterday my discovery of Andre Gide’s Journals and the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins for the first time on one and the same afternoon when I was browsing in a library there used to be in a building on the Queens Park Savannah which had white stone walls covered with blazing red bougainvillea. I can’t remember exactly the name of the library but I loved going there. There I had my first taste of the inspiration of good literature and of poetry in particular.
Then I went to England and to Cambridge and what can one say, without writing a whole book about the libraries there? I have spent countless golden hours in libraries in England. There was the great Cambridge University Library where I read the original dispatches of English diplomats from Paris in the middle of the French Revolution and was filled with wonder to think how I was holding history in my two living hands. There was the British Museum Library, one of the greatest of all cathedrals of man’s recorded thought. There was the Ashmolean in Oxford, another glory of learning and intellect and the human spirit at its best.
But there were also smaller libraries in which I wandered and browsed and sat and read and studied and thought and dreamed and altogether spent some of the happiest times of my life. I remember in particular the Seeley Historical Library just off Kings Parade in Cambridge where I did much of my studying for the History Tripos. That was a lovely place. I remember it even smelled good, of apples and cedarwood, as if the books themselves were eatable. I was quite happy, especially in winter, to go in there from the opening in the morning, taking sandwiches and a flask for lunch, and spend the whole day taking down books and reading until evening came. In fact, some days, if you had discovered for the first time a great new author, like Runciman writing on the Crusades for instance, the time seemed much too short and you grudged leaving that lovely hall of learning.
And then, after my university years, when I came to Guyana I found among people a love of reading and of books and of good writing which made me feel that I had come to a good home. The library at the old Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society and the old Carnegie Library, as it then was, were much-loved haunts of mine. Indeed, as long as I live, libraries will always seem to me the public places which deserve the utmost love and consideration and assistance and encouragement in any nation which hopes to preserve and expand its heritage, educate its people, and inspire its most valuable citizens.
In this centenary year, I deeply hope the vital need to expand the stock of our national and university libraries and considerably extend their reaching out to our young people and the need to provide additional human resources for library expansion and administration will not be lost in the crowd of priorities jostling for cabinet attention. Food and fuel are essential in any society – food and fuel for the mind I mean.
