Happy Birthday, President Lincoln

OK, it's a bit complicated, but here's the story.  I'm walking to school with Felix the other day and apropos of nothing he asks "What does 'perish' mean?"  ("Uh oh," I thought to myself.)  "It means to die or disappear."  Pause, pause.  "What does it mean to 'perish from the earth'?"  ("Perish from the earth?  Where have I heard that before?")  "Like the dinosaurs, that all of them are dead forever."  This seemed to satisfy him.

On the way home, just me and the Gid, I realized where I'd heard that phrase:  the final lines of the Gettysburg Address.  Allow me:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

And sure enough, this is where he got it.  As you may recall from my posting on our trip to Hawaii, we gave Felix an mp3 player and headphones, noting that "With books you can at least judge them by their covers. With audiobooks, who knows? I hope it's good for you, whatever it is you're listening to so intently."  One of those books was Just a Few Words, Mr. Lincoln, a read-along version, book and CD, I'd borrowed from the library intending to read with him on the trip.  This plan never came to fruition--vacation plans, or rather plans for vacation, rarely do--and having returned home I took back the item.  But it did not occur to me to erase the mp3 file still on his player, and apparently, having listened to Ozma of Oz, some Just So Stories, Amelia Bedelia, and quite a lot else, he arrived at this.

Truth be told, you often can judge a book by its cover, at least if you take the trouble to look at it.  I admit I didn't, at least not closely enough to notice the subtitle, "The Story of the Gettysburg Address."  I picked this up for Felix assuming it contained a few short, humorous tales about Lincoln and about why he was so great.  You know, the "Honest Abe" one about him walking miles to return a few pennies to a short-changed customer, that kind of thing.  It did not occur to me that it would discuss the Battle of Gettysburg--bloodiest battle of that most bloody of wars--or Lincoln's leaving his son's sickbed to travel to that place, or the speech itself, which, though elevating, contains a good deal about death and the dead.

Ah well, there's no undoing it now:  things have a way of sticking with Felix.  Indeed, the only way is forward:  I'm going to make him memorize the Address, that's what I'm going to do, and I'm going to make sure he understands it, too.  Happy Birthday, Mr. Lincoln, and thank you again for your words.

Libraries I have known and loved

I love no place so much as a library.  I love what they contain (books and readers), I love what they represent (careful storage, all-inclusive organizational schemes, the hush of concentration), I love what they look like (the sole exception being the disaster that dominated what little skyline my hometown boasted), and somehow, while I do not love the masses, I feel a real sense of charity toward all whom I encounter in a library, not least that sexiest of beings, the librarian.

My earliest library-related memory is from elementary school. Here's a picture of that memory:

Ignore the children, I don't know them, but the pit to the left I know very well for I spent most of my first and second grade years there. An adventurous school, influenced I suppose by Montessori, it allowed children of tender years to design their own schedules. This was a problem. More precisely, the fact that they allowed the children to do their designing in pencil, that was a problem. I quickly developed a routine whereby each Monday I would structure my week such that I took a week's worth of library time all on Monday and Tuesday, with less desirable subjects, penmanship in particular, left for the end of the week. On Wednesday morning, eraser in hand, I would reverse my week. One result of this is that my handwriting is totally illegible. Another, I argue, is that I really, really love books.

My hometown contained wonderful public libraries, too, in particular this one, the Jones:

This fine building contained the entire Oz series (which I am now rereading in company with Felix:  what a bizarre world that is!), Flash Gordon serials, Tintin, dozens of volumes of Tom Swift, and so much more, most of which I had to read within its stone walls: my mother being congenitally unable to return a book on time (or ever) and not above stealing her children's library cards, borrowing privileges for the entire family were in a more or less permanent state of suspension.

I was a librarian myself once, or at any rate, I worked in a library.  And not just any library, but one of the world's greatest, the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, core library of the Harvard system, the grand staircase of which is shown here:

At the time this single library contained 4 million volumes held in stacks extending over a dozen or so floors, four of which were deep underground.  On my way to work each day I routinely ignored the doorway shown in the center of the photo (others might not: it leads to a room at the very core of the building which houses one of the world's few complete Gutenberg Bibles), but I never failed to note the mural to the left of that doorway, which I first encountered as a summer school student a few years previous. Here it is more clearly:

Sargent's "Death and Victory," an entrancing horror showing a representative of the Entente trampling a German corpse even while stumbling beneath the load of a couple of Concepts. Few works of art have made such a deep, albeit indefinable, impression on me, and none have been so fatefully influential: I attended Harvard, rather than Stanford, my other great option at the time, because of this mural and the fascination it held for me.  Really.  It was a close call, and the mural decided it.  (I was 19, what do you expect?  As it happens, many years later I was a visiting scholar at Stanford, and I can say with certainty that their libraries, as a system and each taken on its own, do not compare.  On the other hand, they have the sun.)  The mural decided me, too, on getting a job in that library, which job was to keep people out of the stacks:  I examined the IDs of those who tried to get in via the portal to those stacks, separating thereby the Doughboys from the Huns. And occasionally I was tasked with running some errand or another in those stacks.  Holy was that place to me, and my lifetime right to access it is the only benefit of being an alum I treasure.

There have been other libraries since then, of course. I had access to and found excuse to use the LoC when on the Hill. I spent some time in a grad student carol in Olin Library at Cornell. I wrote most of my dissertation in various of several branches of the SF Public Library system, and researched more than a little of it in the NYPL main branch, a great library if ever there was one. However, I made little use of libraries in the Netherlands, which are typically closed stack and not much worth exploring even if you can get by their guardians (the Amsterdam public system just built a lovely new main branch but the collection was and remains poor). The one really notable exception to this last is Johannes's library, which I have spent more time in, or at any rate sitting next to, than any other, but that's a story for another time.

And so we arrive back at the present day when, I am happy to report, I once again have a really fine library at my disposal:

Fairfax Public. A solid collection, both for adults and--of increasing importance these days--kids; functional carols with wireless and outlets; a sundeck; coffee allowed. Most of my (paid) work these days is done from here, one of the very most special privileges in what I am increasingly recognizing is a very privileged life indeed.