Where to find what you are looking for
Meaning and the library
For my birthday this year, my college roommate, who is now a librarian, sent me a little book called What You Are Looking For Is In the Library by Michiko Aoyama. The title delighted me immediately. And the book is wonderful.
It centers around the library in a small community center in a Tokyo neighborhood—and in particular, its librarian. Five characters who feel vaguely as though their lives are missing something find their way there. She asks, “What are you looking for?” When they explain as best they can—they don’t always know before they answer her—she gives them recommendations that target their inquiry, and one more reference that seems not to fit. And then she hands them a small handmade felted figure. Each character seeks out that surprise book and finds both it and the felted figure meaningful in some way that ultimately gets them unstuck.
Also—I was going to say recently, but my library borrowing records show it was in 2021—I read The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. This is the story of Nora Seed who, after taking an overdose of pills, finds herself between life and death in a magical library with a wise librarian who informs her that the volumes in the library represent all of the lives she could have led had she made different decisions at various points in her life. It’s a liminal hub for all the possible worlds in which Nora exists. Opening a book transports Nora into a particular life—only as her current self, not the self in that life, so she’s sometimes scrambling to reconstruct the context and live into that other version of herself. Whenever she becomes dissatisfied with any given life, she finds herself back in the library and able to sample a different possible world. In the end Nora learns what she really wants.
For me, the library experience is fully sensory. Well—maybe not taste; bibliophiles “devour” only metaphorically. But books have a distinctive homey, wise smell that welcomes me in at the door. The feel of running my hands along the spines of the books, or the soft, smooth texture of the pages, is something I always savor. The hushed atmosphere invokes awe at the vastness of creativity and knowledge, immersion in a million interesting things. And most libraries are attractive spaces,1 which I like to think of as an homage to the Platonic connections between the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
I’m not widely read enough to know whether there’s a sub-sub-genre of (magical?) realism about transformative libraries, but if there isn’t, there should be. Libraries are places of curiosity, fascination, and (self-)discovery. Walk along a row and discover shelves full of the meanings others have made of some morsel of the human experience. How often have I gone to the library in search of a particular book and been waylaid just browsing the shelves around it?
Libraries are, of course, full of information. But it would be a terrible disservice to leave it at that. As the books I mentioned above remind us, libraries are also full of possibilities. Full of enlightenment, if we’re receptive to it. I begin any philosophy class by explaining the difference between reading for information and reading for enlightenment,2 because most of what we do in philosophy isn’t aimed primarily at learning who said what—though we do that—but at what it means for someone to have said it and what we can make of it for ourselves. The metaphor of the library invokes the value of the humanities: we get to try on possibilities, make meaning of our own situations.
“The humanities” is a surprisingly difficult category to define. It’s often done with a list: philosophy, languages and literatures, history, rhetoric. But that doesn’t explain what these subjects have in common. In our recent general education redesign, we described them in a way I’m very proud of:
This Way of Thinking seeks to recognize and understand how humans have represented and constructed the human experience, and to thereby empower students as critical and creative agents in their own lives and communities. This Way of Thinking is the study of how human beings use texts, in different times and places, to understand, represent, and shape their world, and their experience of that world. Students will investigate, interpret, and analyze texts such as written works, spoken language, visual images, film, song, performance, or other cultural artifacts, in order to explore how human engagement with the world constructs meaning and shapes particular social and historical contexts. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which elements of expression are influenced by their place and period of production.
Students will explore human efforts to make sense of the world around them and the ways in which those efforts shape the human experience. This Way of Thinking recognizes that human experience may involve textual engagement with community, internal life, the natural world, and/or the past and future. Key to engaging this process is the act of writing, in which students learn to reflect, refine, focus, and clarify their own analysis as active participants in making meaning of the world around them.
The humanities are in the business of studying and making meaning. I think it’s fundamental to human nature that we create artifacts that capture our experiences and the meanings we find in them. These acts of creation satisfy the internal need for reflection in ourselves in a way that externalizes it for an audience to share in, refract, amplify, and incorporate into their own experience.
The characters in What You Are Looking For and Midnight Library aren’t told how to move forward. They’re nudged by perceptive and wise librarians to find meaning for themselves and carry on. What more satisfying activity could there be?
At least in the main space. The depths of the stacks at a college library are very frequently arranged around function rather than beauty, in my experience.
Credit to David Concepción’s paper “Reading Philosophy with Background Knowledge and Metacognition”.