Whoosh!

This afternoon I got on my bike and zoomed down to the new Bibliotheque. When going downtown, I often ride through Parc Lafontaine, continue on the bike path up Cherrier, and take the long downhill glide down Berri, and that's what I did today - only to find "trottoir barre" (sidewalk closed) signs at the bottom, and concrete trucks pouring new pavement on the rue Berri side of the library. Not only that, there was a big crowd of people sitting in the sun outside, and a line toward the door, where polite, laid-back security guards in grey uniforms were answering questions. It turned out that the library was closed - or maybe evacuated? - and wouldn't re-open until 3:00, about twenty minutes away. So I parked and locked my bike, took off my helmet, and, like everybody else, sat down in the sun. There was a copy of the Mirror lying nearby, and it was the recent "Best of Montreal" issue, so I browsed through all the readers' rankings of everything from "Best Thai" to "Best Kitsch/Antique Shop" to "Best Place to Have Public Sex". Congrats to Montreal City Weblog, Zeke's Gallery, Blork, YulBlog, and Ni Vu Ni Connu for all making it onto the Top Ten list for Best Montreal Blog!

When the library opened I went in, stood on line for another pleasant five or ten minutes watching this amazingly diverse company of readers, while hundreds of us made our way through the security gates, and then listened as the building absorbed the multitude. Within a few minutes, as I sat at one of the free multimedia terminals looking at The Cassandra Pages and sending email to J., just to see if it all worked, the noisy chattering of the crowd quieted to a blend of murmuring voices, rustling pages, and keyboard clicks. The lines lengthened for abonnement (subscribing) and document check-out, feet went up and down the wide central staircases, and the glass elevators sped smoothly up and down the exposed black shafts.

The library is organized on the Dewey Decimal System (no, Virginia, the Library of Congress does not exist here) which reminds me of sixth grade, when we had to learn it. I've always liked the Dewey system, and wandering around the new library I appreciated how easy it was to find and remember what was where.

I found myself, then, in the Biography section: row on row of stacks labeled "Chefs d'Etat", or "Militaire", or "Sport". "So many lives!" I thought, and yet these chosen luminaries, all together, would barely populate a small city. I walked down the sections for Music, for Painting, for Literature, past the names on the spines, familiar and not-so-familiar. Nearly all of them, I knew, contained seeds of a similar story: awareness of a particular gift; conflict between its pursuit and a personal life; periods of self-doubt and depression; moments of joy and certainty.

And I thought of how so many of us have dreamed, at one time, of being among them -- how being in a library is, in fact, one way of rubbing shoulders with those who inspire and inflame and irritate us through their dedication, their genius, their poverty, their fame.

At that moment the hall of biographies seemed like a monument to those lives - a literary cemetery, perhaps, to be a bit tongue-in-cheek about it. And it occurred to me that for the first time in history, the lives not only of famous writers are being chronicled and examined in minutiae, but those of many others who may never have the chance or the connections or the circumstances necessary to make it onto the shelves, but who do - out of no less dedication or talent - commit the stuff of their lives to words in this new medium, the weblog.

Whoosh... silently slide the sleek elevators from the first floor to the top, and back down again, discharging and taking on passengers.

Comments

[Martine]

Thanks for the félicitations, although Blork rains on our parade a bit today (but he's right). ;-)

We almost met at the library today! But I heard on the radio that it was closed - because of a big power outage in the neighborhood - so I headed home instead.

[Ivy]

Ah, I like this post, beth. I love libraries, have always preferred to live inside novels and words and all that jazz. The smell of books transports me. Your library sounds so wonderful! Hurray!

[leslee]

...a similar story: awareness of a particular gift; conflict between its pursuit and a personal life; periods of self-doubt and depression; moments of joy and certainty.

What encouragement, even if we don't necessarily want to rub shoulders with those greats but simply want to express our modest gifts and pursue our dreams. And interesting point about the connection between biographies on shelves and these weblogs of ours! The library does contain these, too, through its computer terminals.

[susurra]

and the internet a vast library isn't it? holding all of our biographies. you are brilliant! wouldn't it be nice if it had that familiar smell when we log on? this triggered some memories I think I'll write about in my blog today. and like Leslie I too was touched by the thought of the shared struggles between readers and those who inspire us. the gift you have is to beautifully describe the details of the ordinary, and then take the ordinary and turn it over so we can see what is extraordinary about it. hope you find the new blog site works better for you.