Rediscovering the Joy of Public Libraries
You should really visit yours
It’s quite hard to focus these days. Clarification: it’s quite hard to focus when you’re like me and dedicate the lion’s share of your waking hours to browsing the internet. Surely it’s not just me — the average American spends 6.3 hours a day interacting with digital media.
Truth be told, I love the internet.
It’s this wonderfully weird place that shrinks the gap between human will and human achievement. My favorite Reddit posts are the ones that recruit the collective effort of the internet to some delightful end, like this one. My buddy and I figured out how to flush the transmission fluid in my old Subaru from a YouTube video. I’ve met friends and lovers on the internet. There’s more to be said of the internet’s vast beneficence to humanity, but that’s for another post.
I mentioned having trouble focusing: these days, I find it brutally difficult to sit down and work on a single task, moreso when that task is self-imposed, like writing. I think a great deal of this incessant mental fickleness has to do not with my behavior when focusing, but rather when idling.
I am a prolific purchaser of gadgets, most of which are internet-enabled, and thus, when I’m bored, I have a multitude of digital stimulants available to numb my thoughts, like a depressed man who happens to own a liquor store.
Then, when the time comes, I put aside my devices to focus on writing, but, wholly drained of subconscious cognitive inspiration, I find myself at a scatter-brained standstill. The seemingly obvious remedy then is to find inspiration on the internet! and well, we know where that goes.
This was about the time I decided to visit my local public library.
Non-automatic glass doors. The aroma of woody vanilla and musty carpets. Books on shelves, books in carts, books on laps, books in hearts — I felt like a prodigal son, hesitantly returning to an eagerly waiting father.
I selected a window-side cubby, sat down, and just, wrote. To do anything besides write or read felt sacrilegious in the presence of such daunting volumes of literature.
When it came time for a break, I perused the shelves, immersing myself in their oaky embrace. Each title was an invitation to explore, a front-row seat to the musings of another mind. I wound up leaving with three new paragraphs, a visual primer on local architecture, and a thick little collection of critique on American literature.
For all its encyclopedic breadth, the internet is utterly unserendipitous. It’s engineered, algorithm-driven, explainable. It’s also ludicrously cluttered, often by fiscal motives. A “random” discovery on the internet is never actually random — it’s a click-driven traversal through well-calculated paths.
It’s a paradoxical conundrum to be surrounded by millions of creations and feel no desire to create — something Jak Wilmot learned after a week in VR. Contrast browsing the pages of the internet to browsing the shelves of the library, where your experiences are bound not by attention-span limits and monetization but only the laws of physics and the Dewey Decimal system.
To stand amongst shelves, to physically surround yourself with options and ponder them, to pull a book from its resting place and stir it into animation — these are active functions of reason, not passive submissions to algorithmic suggestions. A “random” discovery in the library can be as simple as finding a misplaced book on a cart to taking the suggestion of a passerby returning her books — serendipitous indeed.
Feeling uninspired? Struggling to focus? It might be time to go back to where it all started — the local public library.
