Where ideas are born

Norman Cousins

Norman Cousins once said, "A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life."

Many people may think just the opposite, that a library, whether large or small, is something more like a cemetery where old ideas, old history and old stories are laid to rest. The future, to them, lies elsewhere. Libraries represent the past.

I often think back to high school. Why did our teachers insist that we have a certain number of references for our reports and essays? This was a nuisance to so many students, who preferred to find one good source, usually World Book encyclopedia in my day, and then paraphrase it.

I did not understand it at the time, but I came to realize that different ideas from different sources can produce something new and original when melded together in the mind of an original thinker.

It was much the same when I became a newspaper reporter. A news story with just one source — or worse, from a press release — tended to be weak and uninteresting. But when there were multiple sources, some from each side of an issue, the story had life and originality. It became something new.

The library is a storehouse of ideas, observations, stories and records that, as Cousins suggests, gives birth to something new. The best nonfiction books often have many pages of references at the back. I pulled David McCullough's 1776 off my shelf. It has more than 70 pages of source notes and bibliography. To produce his original book, he clearly spent hours upon hours in various libraries. History came alive, thanks to libraries.