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Libraries

PR1245 .B5 Got it? Kindred soul!

I've been wondering how many years or months I've spent in libraries. I have always loved them; they seemed a shortcut to life, a way to know without having to feel.

All life, all wisdom, all poetry catalogued. A short walk from Beowolf to Virgina Woolf to the Big bad Wolf, God and devil in the same row.

With my own mind ever in chaos, butcher knives waiting silently in the kitchen drawer for the right time to call out, and bridges and tall buildings whispering like sirens in the wind, library catalogues seemed like a calm mind. Rows and rows of small drawers with index cards be-typed by cataloguers, with subject categories from the most general to the specific--a world ordered and predictable and safe.

My favourite has always been the LCC, the Library of Congress classification system. Even though it is more enumerative than epistmological, its attractiveness lies in that it does not seek to reach beyond what is human. With my university years (my many, many university years) spent largely among books classified according to the LCC, I can still find my way around academic libraries without much consulting the catalogue. PR 1772 English poetry, BF psychology, followed by aesthetics and ethics (what a sequence! it deserves a dissertation unto itself). Does anyone still notice such things now that everything is computerized?

Then there is the Dewey Decimal. Eschewing letters, the Dewey seems to lack imagination. Ordered by discipline, not subject, it is less of a browser's delight. It is too orderly, too clinical. Oddly, I first encountered the Dewey Decimal in a Psychiatric Hospital in Toronto. When my mind had stopped functioning according to any supposedly normal classification system I became a patient. (Is theis the point where I say that of course this story is entirely fictional, and that any resemblance to persons alive or dead is altogether coincidental?) When I appeared ready for reintegration into the world and a return to some measure of work, the aptitude test showed I might be suited to working in--a library! Twice a week after therapy I shelved Freud and Jung and Boulby and the DSM IV. When patrons came, I hid in the stacks.

Putting books in order felt good. Even if it was the Dewey Decimal. Soon I sat at a library technician's desk, doing research, procuring books and articles for psychiatrists who looked intently at my right or left ear, avoiding the scars my fingernails had carved on my cheeks even as they explained their need for books on self-harming behaviours.

When I left the city I began to read plants and horse ears and dog paws, the tracks chipmunks leave in the snow and the loopy trails of coyotes wandering down the drive at dusk. Farming manuals, equipment instructions.

Eventually I found my way back into the small public library of the small town down the road from the farm. The classification headings are FIC and MYS and SCIFI and ROM! Dismay does not describe what I felt at such sacrilege. Poetry has no section. It is under NON FICTION, which is also where you find Shakespeare and Lowell and Huxley.

But soon I loved all of MYS, eseccially Nordic writers such as Mankell, Holt, Indridasen, and many more. There is not much point checking the catalogue, because even if a book is "in," it might well be be at the branch library. So you just see what's on the shelf and let yourself be surprised. Today, looking for Elizabeth Bishop and David Grossman, I came away with two Swedish mysteries and (from the NON FIC section) this:



Now, what more can one say after this? Long live provincial libraries! Good for God, about time you got yourself a dog!

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