Coming Back to the Library

I grew up in libraries, or at least it feels that way.

My family lived in the suburbs of Cleveland, about a mile from the Bertram Woods Branch of the Shaker Heights Public Library system. Throughout my childhood, my mother drove me there a couple of times a week.

Our visits were never long enough for me. I loved wandering around the shelves, scanning the spines ( 书脊) of the books until something happened to catch my eye. On the way home, we talked about the order in which we were going to read our books before they were due back. My mother would then always mention that, if she could have chosen any profession for herself, it would have been librarian. The car would grow silent for a moment as we imagined what an amazing thing that would have been.

When I was older, I usually walked to the library by myself. My mother died two years ago, and since then, when I miss her, I like to picture us in the car together, going for one more trip to Bertram Woods.

I might have spent the rest of my life thinking about libraries the way I thought about, say, the amusement park I went to as a kid. But then the familiar feeling came back into my life unexpectedly. In 2011, my husband accepted a job in Los Angeles, so we left New York, where we had been living.

My son was in first grade when we moved. One of his first school assignments was to interview someone who worked for the city. My son said that he wanted to interview a librarian. So we went to the closest library, the Studio City branch. It was about a mile away from our house, the same distance that the Bertram Woods branch was from my childhood home.

As we drove over to meet the librarian, I experienced a gut-level (发自肺腑的) recollection of this similar journey in my past—another parent and child on their way to the library. We parked up, and made our way to the library door.

The building didn't look anything like the Bertram Woods branch, but when we stepped inside, a thunderbolt (霹雳)of recognition struck me so hard that it made me gasp (倒吸气). Decades had passed, and I was two thousand miles away, but I really felt as if I had returned to that time and place, walking into the library with my mother. Nothing had changed. There was the same soft tsk-tsk-tsk of pencil on paper, and the murmuring (窃窃私语) of people sitting at the tables in the center of the room. The wooden checkout counters, the librarians’ desks, the bulletin board, were all the same.

It wasn't that time stopped in the library. It was as if it had been captured here, or collected, A library, for me, is a gathering pool of stories and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse imorality (不朽); in the library, we can somehow live forever.