Seeking the Unexpected

John Mortimer, author of the Rumpole of the Bailey series, commented in an essay that a thing he hated was to enter a room full of people whose words he would know before they opened their mouths. I feel the same way about books. I opened my Internet browser to CNN this morning and found four ads from Sears for items I had viewed the day before on Amazon. Aside from the invasion of privacy implicit in their presence, they offered nothing new, except perhaps price, beyond what I had seen the day before. You can choose whether you want liberal or conservative TV news by picking between Fox and CNBC. A prime goal for Internet publishers these days is to provide you with a personalized news service that presents you only with information they know you are interested in and will enjoy. I am appalled at the idea.

After my father died when I was two years old and my mother worked long hours as a seamstress, my after-school babysitter was the public library.  It was a delight to roam the stacks, constantly encountering new and totally surprising knowledge. There were no categories of what I had been interested in previously, what I would enjoy reading or what would be suitable for me. I tasted a bit of everything from Rabelais to Relativity, from Mein Kampf to Machiavelli, from the Crimson Pirate to science fiction. Some things I hated, but all things taught me at least what to ignore. Later on, browsing in my very good college library for background readings on Renaissance politics, I stumbled on the Memoirs of Casanova. I still chuckle over that. Learning comes from reading the unexpected, not the expected.

The Washington Post this Sunday published a review of a recent book on the future of the public library in the Internet age. Unfortunately, the book reviewed was by the chief librarian of the Harvard Law Library, a lawyer himself. His lament was that libraries were falling behind the technology of the internet, and that nostalgia over the past was an impediment to bringing them up to date by making them more efficient information scavengers. That would be suitable for specialized institutions like law libraries, but it misses the point of the general library entirely. The general library is meant to be an entrance to the hallways of knowledge, not an exhaustive source of knowledge on any particular subject. The good library is at its best when it surprises you.

I have commented before about how our current culture is separating us into tinier and tinier bubbles, where no one really can experience and understand the lives of others outside their own group. The rich and poor used to shop side by side and attend the same schools, except in the segregated South. We had no interaction with far off countries. Now,we do not understand where countries with whom we must deal, such as those in the Middle East, are coming from, just as our police and the angry protesters surrounding them do not understand each other. The wealthy do not understand the lives of the poor. Those things in turn are major contributors to the pervasive empathy gap which creates so many of our social and political problems.

Karen Armstrong, in her recent book, Fields of Blood, points out that the Indian word Moksha, which we often translate as enlightenment, originated in ancient times as the military term for breaking through a hostile encirclement. That to me is in fact what enlightenment is about these days. We are surrounded by technological and social pressures that hem us in to our particular niche in a complex society, that know what interested us yesterday and force us to see only that again today, that deny us knowledge of what the world is about outside our particular niche by deluging us with knowledge “appropriate” to our place. Enlightenment comes from breaking that encirclement to enter the glorious chaos of surprising knowledge. That, not efficiency, should be the goal of our librarians, as it should be our own.