My Library has Allowed me to Become the Person I Wanted to be
{ Books & Learning, Life }
May 20, 2008
And so this evening I am stalking about in my own library, peering at things that have at some time stopped me in my tracks: my illuminated manuscript from 1450, my precious books, my feeble attempts at self-made literature, my late-adolescent yearnings.
And then I realize: those misty fantasies of my late teens–now true. I am a collector, a reader, a pouncer towards knowledge. I chart stars, sort rocks, read about Elizabethan England. I’m stable, I hack, I go, I see, I read, I learn, I have, I love.
My greatest urgings in 1997 caught in a sketchbook journal: maps of the comet Hale-Bopp, diagrams of the different shapes of raindrops, smudgy and pathetic sketches of the two people near me (Ruslan, Mike), emotive poetry that could be worse (about someone I would never really know)–would I not be proud of who I am now?
The desperation is missing but the character remains.
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The journals (the description of your library, your collection of knowledge) evoke for me a character out of A.S. Byatt or Andrea Barrett that I have aspired to as a pursuer of knowledge. I was feeling utterly blah this morning until I read this and realized that I do believe in the power of books to make us into the people we want to be. And now my journal is all filled with musings about when we lost ‘naturalists’ and have only ‘scientists’ and wondering if science is somehow unnatural? That somehow in the 19th century there were sort of gentleman naturalists who had that same thirst for all the knowledge of the world they could get, and it’s not a type one imagines in current times, but why not?
Also thinking of my own adolescent journals: I think I was scared that without the desperation/intensity I would somehow be less, and it’s nice to reflect that who I was then WOULD be proud of who I am now. Thanks for this!