Readings

"I Love You, Madame Librarian"
by Kurt Vonnegut / In These Times

I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury's great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451 degrees Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury's novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

"The Reader's Bill of Rights" Everyone has the right to read. Here's The Reader's Bill of Rights to help you make the most of that right: Readers have:

The right to not read.
The right to skip pages.
The right to not finish.
The right to reread.
The right to read anything.
The right to escapism.
The right to read anywhere.
The right to browse.
The right to read out loud.
The right not to defend your tastes.
--Pennac, Daniel, Better Than Life, Coach House Press, 1996.

"Madam, a circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge; it blossoms through the year. And depend on it ... that they who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit at last."

--Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816). Sir Anthony Absolute, in The Rivals, act 1, sc. 2.

Sermon

Or we may think of the college library where we spent so many pleasant and not-so-pleasant hours hard at work on our research for our papers and theses and dissertations--mine were the Shields Library at UC Davis, and, later, the Doe and Bancroft Libraries at UC Berkeley, each with their rows and rows of stacks upon stacks of accumulated knowledge in the form of, yes, books.

No matter what image comes to mind, or where the setting, or how pleasant or unpleasant the memories, there will, I would wager, be books in our mind. And possibly, quiet. And, at least for me, a continual sense of awe at the vastness of human endeavor and accomplishment, a sense akin to that of standing under a starry night sky and looking up, feeling oneself insignificant and yet connected to all that.

People in marketing, and in pretty much any other field these days seem to talk about the "brand" things have. (What is the "brand" for Unitarian Universalists? We tend to think of claiming famous Unitarians or Universalists as a way of branding ourselves: Thoreau, Channing, Emerson, Kurt Vonnegut, May Sarton, Adlai Stevenson, William Howard Taft, PT Barnum--many of you probably know a great many more. Nothing wrong with claiming our forbears as a way of selling ourselves to the world, I don't think.) For libraries, the brand has to do with books, and with quiet, and with stately buildings. Doesn't it?

What's so great about books?

One of my favorite quotes about books describes a young girl's first discovery of reading: "This, then, is a book....and there are more of them!"

There are more of them. Yes. That is a double-edged sword. Ecclesiastes 12:12 states that "of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh." I remember vividly experiencing a kind of panic one day in the Shields Library, wandering the back stacks, I think it was in the viticulture and enology section even though I never studied winemaking (I did find a spectacular compilation of recipes, in German, for liqueur-making on an industrial scale...but I digress....), and realizing that I would always be limited in what I was actually able to read, as a percentage of the total available output, to a tiny fraction of the accumulation in that one library. Much less in every library.

So, what about that book I found in the viticulture stacks at Davis? I remember how it was bound--in a burlap-like white cloth, stamped with big German fraktur letters. It contained recipes for the manufacture of every possible type of liqueur, including all of the "secret" monkish recipes for Chartreuse, Benedictine, Drambuie, and so on--calling for heaps and bales of herbs I had to use a dictionary to translate (mugwort in German is....?). There was a recipe for coca liqueur, made with bales of coca leaves macerated for weeks in some kind of high-octane alcohol, then sweetened. Was that stuff ever actually made in the kind of quantities laid out in the recipe book? I felt that I had stumbled across a gem of human wisdom. And I had! I'm sure that book is still there in the Shields library--that's the comfort of a great research library: they aren't forced to weed books for the sake of space. The point about that book is that it did an excellent, authoritative job of capturing a certain corner of human knowledge and expertise. It was definitive. It would last forever, or for enough hundreds of years to serve many generations. It had been cataloged and shelved according to its subject matter by professionals whose job it is to take equal care with every book, no matter its topic or point of view.

John Milton wrote a piece called "The Areopagitica" in which he discussed the role of the book in the diffusion of knowledge, and the importance of the free exchange of knowledge, unfettered by censorship or extreme copyright restrictions. It's a seminal document of intellectual freedom. In it he states

"... that if it come to inquisitioning again and licensing, and that we are so timorous of ourselves and so suspicious of all men as to fear each book and the shaking of every leaf, before we know what the contents are; if some who but of late were little better than silenced from preaching, shall come now to silence us from reading, except what they please, it cannot be guessed what is intended by some but a second tyranny over learning ..."

He advocates for the free access of readers to all subject matter, in the belief that Truth will always triumph.

"Since therefore, the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely and with less danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read."

I really love that line: "books promiscuously read."

Milton advocates not just intellectual freedom, but intellectual bravery. He must have been an intimidating opponent. To those who wanted to ban books in order to uphold their religion, he said:

"Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion. Truth is compared in scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy. There is not any burden that some would gladlier post off to another than the charge and care of their religion."

Regardless of what you may think of the notion of a liqueur distilled from the essence of coca leaves, that book belongs on the shelf of a library as serious as Shields.

My first mentor as a librarian was Larry Duckwall at the Alameda County Library. He was in charge of that library's excellent and very progressive Extension Services branch--the branch of the library that served the rural areas of the county via a bookmobile, and also reached out to seniors, English language learners, and those in jails and prisons. That was my first job with them, as a librarian taking books to the inmates at the county's jails and in the Federal prison in Pleasanton. Larry asked me one day to say why the library should have a book about how to make a bomb, or do violence, or one that advocated for something that was morally wrong. I couldn't answer--I couldn't think of any reason that we should have a book like that. Larry said: "Simple. Because it's a book."

That has been my approach to issues of intellectual freedom ever since. In a democracy, we allow people to become informed on all sides of a question, and then to make a decision based upon that information, in the belief that people will choose correctly if they have all the information. All books have an equal right to sit, side by side, on the shelves of our public libraries. I often tell people that I hope the library has something to offend everyone. When our government makes laws regulating the flow of information, when we are told that we should allow the government to have access to the records of what we have been reading, when government documents are revoked and classified and made to disappear from the depositories and websites, I fear for our democracy.

And perhaps more important: I fear for our souls.

A library, to me, is a space as sacred as this sanctuary, which is sacred because we make it so. As sacred as the seashore, or the redwoods, if that serves better as a simile.

Using words like "soul" and "sacred" is always kind of risky in a UU setting, isn't it?

Here's what drew me to Unitarian Universalism: I was, at the behest of my first wife, a fourth-generation Unitarian, attending a service at the First Unitarian Church of Oakland in the early 1980s. The minister was Rob Eller-Isaacs, who was just then embarking upon his work of reviving that church, which had dwindled to a membership of perhaps ten to twenty, meeting in a glorious 1890 romanesque-revival sanctuary with incredible stained glass and oak carving and marble columns. So there we were, perhaps thirty of us, listening to Robbie, who at one point in the service said "I quote from the prophet Kurt Vonnegut: 'we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.'" It wasn't the quote, it was Robbie calling Vonnegut, one of my long-time heroes, a prophet. Here, finally, a church that recognized that literature, modern literature by Americans, was important in a religious way! The church of my childhood and youth was the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. I was devout in my belief. I attended catechism sessions, well, religiously. But at one point, I asked our pastor why it was that no new books had been added to the Bible, since it seemed to me that there were many divinely-inspired religious books. His answer had to do with the idea that the Bible was a complete work, and that there would be no more direct revelation.

I had considered, for this service, singing the hymn, words by Samuel Longfellow, which contains his wonderful line: "revelation is not sealed." That is one of the basic tenets of Unitarian Universalism that rings most true for me: I can have direct experience of the divine. In fact, I am the ultimate religious authority for myself. It does not lie outside of me (did you catch that line from Milton about "posting off to another the charge and care of their religion"? Milton sounds quite a bit like a UU. Oh well--I don't think we can claim him!) But I didn't select that hymn for this service, because really that's the only part of the hymn I much care for--even the tune is tarnished by its association with "Deutschland Uber Alles."

The holiness of a library is not diminished by the contradictions found within and among its books, but is rather augmented by them. All sides of a question can be considered. A library is like what I imagine the mind of god to be--beyond our comprehension, encompassing everything.

And the librarians. What is our role?

Well, simply put, our role is to preserve and make accessible human knowledge. Usually, but not always, in the form of books. We light torches to help find the way in the overwhelm of the accumulation of human knowledge. Those torches take many forms. My first encounter with a librarian was the aforementioned Mrs. Quarterman--always VERY old, from when I first met her, probably at age two or three, up until I eventually worked as a page during high school in my hometown library, and still old when I went away to college, and still old, and still a practicing librarian, when she died while I was at college. She helped me discover the joy of reading, and although I don't remember those early books very well, I do remember the sensation of being welcomed into the library and of finding wonderful things to read.

Most library users who are adults actually feel that they can do quite well without the help of a librarian, thank you very much. They can just go over and look up a book by themselves, find it on the shelf, and check it out, without ever, so they think, interacting with a librarian. Self-service. Well over 90 percent of library users, I think. Hmmm. But who selected the book to be purchased? Who purchased it? Who cataloged it? Who made it ready for the shelf, classifying it so it would sit in the most logical place? For that matter, who advocated for building the library in the first place--ok, that may not have been a librarian, but then again, it may well have been. The truth is, you can't go into a library without encountering our torches lighting the way to what you are looking for.

I am proud to be a librarian. Proud to have a UU prophet like Kurt Vonnegut point to my profession as the staunch defenders of the real America. I love the quote that gave this talk its title--with its implication that the Library in a town can give rise to a thirst for the fruit of the tree whose "leaves" it houses. What are the fruits of knowledge? In America, the fruits of knowledge are supposed to include not only an informed electorate, but also a fuller life for those people. A life that includes the kind of richness and cultural breadth reserved in earlier times for the aristocracy, with ready access to the very best writers and music and art. Not a narrow life, but a life open to the vastness of its own potential. A life worth living, in short.

What I have not done in this talk is to get too specific about the threats to libraries in the current political, social and economic climate. They exist, and they need to be faced. They range from local City budgets to the Federal government's intrusions and strings-attached money, to the attitudes fostered by a culture that only values convenience and speed in its superficial approach to knowledge and information. From fundamentalist-minded people of faith, to the apathy of those who should know better. So, while I won't be specific, I will mention the threats in this way, and ask that you talk to librarians you know and find out what needs to be done to keep our trees of diabolical knowledge evergreen.