Where time is saved

In the library, time is dammed up — not just stopped but saved. The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who came to find them. It's where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.

Susan Orlean, The Library Book

Susan Orlean

Let's examine those three Susan Orlean sentences from The Library Book one by one:

1. In the library, time is dammed up — not just stopped but saved.

Orlean may be writing about public libraries, large or small, but I think the idea works for small private libraries, or even a shelf of books. Select any book, including Orlean's own book, and you can be taken back to the time being written about but also to the time when it was written. A book holds firm not just the author's ideas and imaginings, but also the words, phrasings and manners of the time. Chaucer wrote the way Chaucer wrote, and that doesn't change with time. The same with Shakespeare, Faulkner or anyone else.

2. The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who came to find them.

I like her idea of a library as a gathering place for both books and patrons. It is where one goes to meet the other. A library with one but not the other isn't much of a library. That was true of the 1986 fire that destroyed many of the books in the Los Angeles Public Library. That was a case of patrons without books. Now, because of library closures caused by the coronavirus, we have books without patrons.

3. It's where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.

It has occurred to me more than once that heaven, if it is not a library, should at least have a library in it. Orlean suggests a good library is a kind of heaven already, paradise without the bother of dying.

I am not sure who she means by the word we. Patrons? No, patrons are the ones who "glimpse immortality." They have to go home by the closing hour, and Orlean writes about the surprising number of people who die in libraries. No, it seems more likely that it is the books and those who write them who live forever in a library. As an author herself, Orlean can say we.

But if you think God must be selective about admissions to heaven, public libraries are no less so. And most of the books awarded shelf space are there only temporarily. Most are eventually discarded to make room for newer books. So that is hardly immortality.

Yet there are some books and some authors who have won shelf space for the long term. Among them are Augustine, Charlotte Bronte, Arthur Conan Doyle, Walt Whitman and Flannery O'Connor. A thousand years from now? Who knows? But long enough to seem immortal to us. For those few time has been both stopped and saved.