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”

Reading in bed

RECENTLY, I rediscovered reading in bed.

I read in bed as a child. Growing up, we had an old black-and-white television in the living room. Until my father replaced it with a secondhand color set, this temperamental box required tedious tinkering with its antenna or wires to project a picture that had a mist of snowfall overlying the scenes, even those set in sweltering jungles.

Coupled with my father’s implacable rules—no TV on weekdays; the last full show on Fridays and Saturdays aired at 7 p.m.—it was no contest between a book and that artifact.

Even during the interminable summer, when a book was never not beside me during the day, I still read in the evenings until sleep crept up and stilled the turning of the page. For the young, sleep is a waste of time.

When I heard my father’s snores, I read by the glare of the family flashlight whose batteries were regularly replenished, my father decreed, for “emergencies”. Sudden brownouts then made reading challenging but not impossible.

Bedtime reading was a juggling act. I could not be caught reading by flashlight because my father worried about the abuse of my eyes. I made the batteries reasonably last because I could not imagine explaining to my frugal parent that the absolute need to discover what lay beyond a chapter’s cliffhanger fell under the category of an emergency.

In summer, when no novels could be borrowed from the school library, the book at hand had to last until the next batch of borrowed paperbacks.

Ah, but how else should youth be lived except on the edge? In spite of astigmatism (my father’s fear realized), reading in bed became a habit, a tic, a reflex, along with reading while waiting, reading in the toilet, reading during breaks, reading in the car, reading despite next day’s exam, etc.

Marriage and children paused the nighttime binges. I couldn’t withdraw into other worlds while starting a family.

Then graduate school and its regimen of reading made this trickle of fear: what if I forgot how to read? What was reading but retreating into other worlds?

Reading again fiction at midnight or dawn, I note these changes: I time these binges no longer under the cover of my father’s snores but only when I sleep alone and no one gets jolted by a book, instead of a pillow, or the beam of my smart phone, instead of the family flashlight.

But these nocturnal readings—of the fantastic or the mythic, read in silence or reenacted on bedroom walls as shadows eloping with the storytelling or segueing into other excursions—I would still very much consider as a personal emergency: tell me, how does the tale end?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s January 20, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”