Library Roulette WIN!

Libraries have always been my refuge from the real world. This new book is the perfect antidote for COVID hangover and retirement blues.

Before I retired, I might spend a quick five minutes in the library checking out the books held for me at the front door. There’s a lot to be said for the convenience of using the computer to make your wish list, sending it to the library and then picking up your stack after the invisible librarian staff member walks around the shelves on three floors to get them together for you.

Now that I have free time, I hit the library for at least three hours every other Wednesday, with most of the time spent editing a friend’s book, and half an hour or so perusing the new book section to see what catches my fancy. After pulling six or seven books with great covers and a good flyleaf write up, I sit in a comfy chair - or BEQUEM STUHL as my German Duolingo squirrel brain just reminded me - and read the first two pages of each book. I reject a couple, then check out the rest.

This new leisurely routine is much more in keeping with my childhood. My mother took us to the libraries in Augusta,GA every chance she had - to check out books, for story hours, and sometimes evening family movies on a big screen outside in the summer months. My favorite branch in Augusta was the Appleby Library, with books spread out all over the main floor of an old antebellum house with columns, a broad staircase and trees. And a constantly humming air conditioner. I’d walk in from the scorching, humid parking lot and ahhhh, so cool. Well, really almost frigid. I think it was harder to regulate the thermostat back then.

But my favorite library of all-time is the Mary Willis Library in Washington, Wilkes County, GA, about an hour from Augusta and home to both sides of my family. (Locals refer to their town as Washington-Wilkes, so it isn’t confused with all the other Washingtons all over the country. ) The Confederate gold was supposedly lost somewhere in this county, and the last meeting of the Confederate government also happened right here. Today, it’s a small, beautiful town with all of the old, pre-Civil War homes still standing. Rumor has it that General Sherman, the Union General, had a girlfriend in the county so spared it from the flames when he marched through Georgia. Pretty sure that girlfriend was a euphemism for something less savory, but we’ll leave it as is.

I would walk the four blocks from my grandmother’s house to the library, sometimes accompanied by my Great Aunt Alliene. (Alliene was my reading hero - she had bookshelves against every wall of her bedroom, and I inherited her Victorian rocking chair and Zane Grey collection, most from the 1920s.. They’ve travelled around the world with us.)

She would make a weekly trip to the library carrying a book bag very similar to the one I carry today. We’d carefully step over cracks in the sidewalk caused by huge trees whose roots had outgrown their assigned section and sprawled through the concrete. The library was like a dream castle, with a beautiful Tiffany window portrait of Mary Willis. The story among my cousins, who lived in the town, was that Mary Willis was a beautiful young girl prone to sleepwalking and she’d walked right out onto her balcony in the night, fallen over the rail and died of a broken neck. Still not sure of the accuracy of that, but I don’t want to mess up a good story with the truth this late in the game.

Even the doors made me feel like the princess in a fairy tale, walking into the castle with my kind fairy godmother of a great aunt. Dust motes floated in the beams of light from the tall windows, and wide old planks of wood gleamed and smelled of lemon oil.

The dream job I imagined as an 8 year old child was to be the librarian and spend my days reading in one of the wing chairs, getting up every once in a while to stamp the cards at the back of the book when patrons wanted to borrow one. (Slamming down that stamp seems so much more satisfying than scanning a bar code.)

More beautiful pictures of the library and Tiffany window - even a fireplace! - here.

ANYWAY, last week at my local library I stumbled across this book - Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, by Katherine May. From the reviews:

“When I tell you that I dogeared almost every page in this book, I'm telling God's honest truth. I didn't know how much I needed someone else to validate what I was going through. The sense that I had lost my curiosity, my imagination, my ability to make meaning.” – NPR Morning Edition host Rachel Martin

“Gentle inspiration for those who feel exhausted or helpless… May shows how paying deliberate attention to what’s around us can surprise us with insights and reveal new connections that deepen our appreciation for the world.” – Washington Post

Well, I’ve felt pretty exhausted and helpless the last three years, so this one looked like a no brainer. So I sat in my bequem stuhl and tried the first page. Lately I wake in the night and a few panicked seconds pass in which I can’t locate myself. I could tell you my name, certainly, but not which version of me I’m dealing with. Oy, lady, you’re preaching to the choir here. So I checked out the book, along with four others, and drove home.

Enchantment sat on my bedside table for a few days while I continued to short circuit my brain with social media, Wordle, and online newspapers, further fraying my attention span. After reading for the umpteenth time that the best way to get good sleep is to give up the blue light reading before bed, I decided to give it a try. Last night and this morning I started to read and, well, I am ENCHANTED with it. Best of all, the hardback version is less expensive than the Kindle, so I’m buying one to keep.

I’m going to give you a few paragraphs to enjoy and whet your appetite with some of her musings on time and the pandemic. (Oh, here’s another squirrel moment for you - one of my younger co-workers kept trying to correct my spelling to WET your appetite. Um, no, little millennial. It’s WHET, like whetting your appetite, or whetting, sharpening, your tool on a whetstone. You wet your whistle. NO, I am NOT old enough to remember the whetstone, but I have read a lot of old books. And I like to look up things I don’t know.)

“Time itself is behaving strangely. It seems to have fallen on this house like snow, clustering in certain dark corners, sparse elsewhere. It lays heavy on my rooftop, tangible in a way I can't quite explain. Certain moments in my daily life have clustered together so that they are almost touching. Every night, when I wash my face, I feel as though I have been standing at my sink in one continuous moment across several months. Time has looped and gathered, and I sometimes worry that I could skip through decades like his, standing in my bathroom, until I am suddenly old. At other points in the day it moves so slowly that I can scarcely believe the world is still turning. Something surely must have stalled.”

Art by Soren Martinsen, Dissolve

“Maybe I have stalled. Perhaps I am depressed, but it does not feel like other depressions I have encountered. I feel none of the self-loathing that once buckled my knees, none of the urge towards destruction. I am still very much afloat, and in fact strangely content. I am just slow, that’s all. I am just empty. I theorise that it’s a kind of pandemic hangover, my wits dulled from too little stimulation, my sensitivities heightened by the lack of demand. I liked the social truce that lockdown brought, but I was also restless and bored. Now I seem to be stuck there. Bored, restless, empty-headed and bodily resistant to changing it. Stillness has settled into my muscles and I don’t know how to feel fluid again.”

Wow, she nails it. I’ve spoken to so many friends, and we all feel like we’re hibernating. Under water. Even though you CAN go out, you don’t. Still stuck in the weird COVID limbo land - the cage door is open, but we’re still circling around inside for the most part. Although I did notice a lot more people in church today so maybe something is finally shifting.

She really hit me with this next one. If you’ve read my earlier columns, you’ll know that I had to give up Twitter. I think Katherine May and I are soul sisters.

“I sit at my desk to work, but instead I fidget between Twitter, and Instagram, and the news, Twitter, and the news, Instagram, and the news, Twitter, and Instagram, and Twitter, and Twitter, and Instagram, and the endless, terrible news, and Twitter again, where everyone is outraged at the news, and everyone seems certain, in one direction or another, about what ought to be done. I can pass hours like this, guiltily flickering between all the human avatars that seem so solid comparted to me, so sure. They give out steady light, and I do not. I gaze at them emptily and wonder how they know so much, how they came to be so sure. I am supposed to be writing, but I lack the solidity to do it. What is there to say, anyway?”

Exactly. Really, I could underline something on every page of this book as applicable to me. And then she starts TEACHING me things. The second chapter is called Hierophany, with this paragraph just tossed in there like I should know exactly what she’s talking about. (And if I’m the last person to know of Mircea Eliade, so be it. At least I know now.)

“Mircea Eliade coined the term hierophany to describe the way that the divine reveals itself to us, transforming the objects through which it works. When we make a tree or a stone or a wafer of bread the subject of our worshipful attention, we transform it into a hierophany, and object of the sacred. “

I had to put down the book at this point to grab my Kindle Fire and search for Mircea Eliade. Fascinating! What a life - from Bucharest to India to Paris to Chicago, to name a few, speaking five languages and writing many books. Quite the scholar. I have ordered The Sacred and the Profane. I can’t believe I’ve never heard of him, but I think I’m fairly plebian as a reader. I still remember the first time someone told me about Nicola Tesla and I started researching him. Same vibe. Geez, my western English Lit education is worth butkus.

I can’t wait to see what and who else I discover as I’m reading through her fascinating journey to enchantment. This last one is perfect for my newly retired persona:

“I don’t want to sit like a brooding hen on the nest of my past achievements. I want to keep on going deep into the uncertain act of making, to see the unknown world stretch out before me and to devote myself to exploring it.”

I think this might be my new mission statement. Excuse me while I stop resting on my laurels and lace up some walking shoes.