The Life of Libraries

I am looking at a photograph of Leith Library: columns, stern grey stonework, height, a distinct air of accomplishment. It begs you to stand in the doorway and cast your eyes upward to its austerely pointed heavens. ‘That’s your nearest library?’ I say to my friend T. Shamefaced, he confesses it is, but that he doesn’t use it; he has enough books yet to read of his own. This is true – I have seen his bookshelves.

It is also true of mine. My Billys overflow; my book situation is like the bread flour at the back of the cupboard that you bought in February 2020 thinking that, whatever happened, you would at least be able to make bread: ossifying, dusty, a bit daft. My book stashes cast their skins, the top ones most likely to be picked up and read, an occasional jenga extraction of others further down, but in the cruel nexus between sub-middle-aged memory and consumerism I frequently now forget what I own. At least dogs, unlike toddlers, cannot pull tomes from the shelves: Hope, ever-intelligent, trots around books rather than across them. There is yet to be an incident where she knocks over a pile on the floor, but it is, surely, only a matter of time, the inevitable mathematics of height of pile multiplied by proximity to sofa divided by direction leapt in by dog from sofa in pursuit of ball.

Yet something has changed, and perhaps in time for me to learn a new trick. Staying with my sister at the end of my recuperation down south, we took a walk one Saturday to her council library. It was the simplest thing to do, but it planted a seed. When I got back to Edinburgh I dug out my local library card, set myself up online, and ordered in a book. Going in to pick it up I caught sight of a staff pick in the window: a novel called Euphoria, by Lily King. I’d never heard of it, but it was about anthropologists, a tribe I have rarely found attended to in fiction, so I took it home and swallowed it in a couple of sittings. Meanwhile, the book I had ordered in languished (sorry, Tom Holland).

I returned Tom, guilt-free, a couple of weeks later. When I went in this time, the window display was celebrating the Edinburgh Science Festival. There was a book jacket covered in stars, enough to pique my interest; a staff member obligingly fished it out, and when I got it home I discovered that its author, Sara Seager, was an astrophysicist at MIT and MacArthur ‘genius’ award-winner, whose lifelong work was the pursuit of life outside our solar system. She had lost her husband to cancer when she was not yet forty; she wrote about love and work, joy and obsession, grief and exoplanets. I loved that book. I read it slowly, savouring it. When I had taken it back to the library, I bought a copy for myself, because it was a book I wouldn’t forget I had.

And suddenly, just like that, my local library was part of my rhythm. A Saturday morning, a Wednesday after work, a new pile on my kitchen table, distinguished by their plastic book jackets. A sigh of relief, finishing Muriel Spark’s admirable but sinister The Driver’s Seat, that I had borrowed and not bought it for book club. When I am first in the reserve queue, I enjoy the sense of a steal, and I revel in the luxury of hardbacks, because the library often has them. But what I really like is that amidst my new routine, the library is exerting its own rhythms over me. Three quarters of the books I take out are those I’ve only spotted under its roof; it’s in the library that I discover that Edinburgh is celebrating its 900th birthday. I even like the fact that I can see I am forty-first in the queue to read Suzanne O’Sullivan’s new book: forty-one of us across the city, all keen for a trenchant take on medical diagnosis for contemporary ills. 

It’s what we need as human beings, over and over again: that feeling that I am part of something greater than an atomised existence. Perhaps the library would not have nabbed me so particularly had I not just spent a year ill at home. Isolation breeds hungers: for loved ones, for books, for the worlds between pages and stars. Libraries feed us. We know this instinctively when we protest at their closure, even if we’ve never used them ourselves. We know that a quiet busy hive of libraries keeps a society alive, with their flow of knowledge and dreams, connected solitude, good company and goodwill, and that when they go, something is not only lost but also destroyed.

In Matt Haig’s speculative novel The Midnight Library, Nora, a woman in the depths of depression, finds herself in a library where every book is a chance to see what would have happened, had she lived her life differently. In the witching hour, suspended in time, she revisits the terrain of all her regrets: where would she be now, if she had not given up swimming? Cancelled her wedding? Ducked out of moving to Australia with her best friend? Nora must open book after book in the Midnight Library, picking up her own story, seeing how it would have played out, until the consequences unspool and the clock finally tolls. 

The book is brilliantly conceived, not only because it captures so perfectly the fundamental what-ifs and would-have-happeneds, the existential torment of depression, but also because it flips it on its head: you really want to know? This is what would have happened, and this is where you would be. Haig, who shares my obsession with cosmology, is essentially asking the question: ‘how do you want to live?’ And not simply that, but how will you live, now, amidst these next ticking hands of the clock, not in the light of all your regrets, but in the light of the sheer wondrous fact that you are alive?

If you don’t yet know your own answers to these questions, perhaps it is enough to know that you want your life to include a library. Large or small, public or private, old grey stonework or sixties concrete. You are alive, and libraries are the stuff of life.

Warm wishes

Kitty