Lost and found

I WOULD feel lost in a world without libraries. I cannot imagine a world without libraries. I can get out of this world just by stepping inside a library.

Yet, there was a moment in my studies when I detested libraries. Every course seemed to require reading books that were out of print, not in the public domain, or shelved in a library elsewhere in the campus.

So I trudged in a physical chase for paper-and-ink books that did not want to be found on shelves. Perfect anachronism in the Age of Google.

One library I reached after navigating a labyrinth of cat poop. In that first visit, I checked under each shoe to make sure I was not bringing in anything I shouldn’t before wiping my feet on the welcome mat. There was none; the librarians apparently shared my anxiety.

Another’s catacomb-like façade was guarded by watchers as grim as Charon, ferrying the dead. The human quizzed me while her feline partner sniffed suspiciously at my shoes (did a whiff of piss and worse from the other lib felines trigger that one’s territoriality?).

In a state university, libraries are not made equal. A few are modern learning hubs; the rest are ageing and dreaming of better funding.

Finding a book sometimes rests on the gods of penmanship: watching the librarian’s fingers spider-crawl through a stack of yellowed, fraying cards held by a band that snaps, finally liberated after aeons of disuse and a succession of librarians spiderly writing the secrets of its shelves.

What is the value found on these shelves? Just the self.

Whether kitty-musty or high-tech, libraries nurture the same thing: silence. Except perhaps for an occasional crescendo of snoring, the library is the only space, outside of a cathedral, where not talking is natural and encouraged.

We have unkindly sketched librarians as humorless enforcers of quietude but the reader herself puts up a canopy of interior silence to hear better the other voice or voices speaking through the written word. While one watches as an author conjures a world from the scaffolding of her imagination or engages with the ideas argued by another, all else recedes into ambient noise—a throat clearing, pages flipped, the fading of the present like dry leaves skittering down the street on a windy day.

For while through reading we escape, we also discover other thoughts, lives strange and compelling, words to express the inchoate lurking until these are named and raised to the light. In the interior unlocked by a book fetched down from a shelf in a library, we come upon ourselves: what we love, what we honor, what we oppose.

In a library, what is found is sometimes not what is lost.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s February 3, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”