Alone, Together

It was evening, and I pulled the shades up on the big windows in the reading room of the Koren Library at Luther College against the afternoon glare. In the summers, there were far fewer students roaming campus and the room was almost empty. But it was I who had opened the library that day, picked up the newspapers lying on the doorstep and strung them on their wooden stick holders and put them on the racks. The librarians were on vacation, and I was in charge for a couple of weeks in 1966.

I had worked at least half time, and often more, at the library throughout my years at college. Under the watchful eyes of Miss Jacobsen and Miss Alsaker, I had filed the typed cards in the many drawers of the card catalog, recorded the arrival of periodicals in log books and gone into the stacks with cartloads of books to shelve according to the Library of Congress system.

In a library there is only one place for anything. This library was very short of space and we struggled to fit in new books. The head librarian had been planning a new one for years, but we weren’t there yet. I got to enjoy three years working in this lovely building, in a totally analog environment, having no idea that its antiquated beauty would be supplanted by the digital world we now live in.

At library school, I bought a typewriter and typed up the bibliography which became my master’s thesis. But I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and didn’t work in a library again until I “retired,” when I began shelving books a few hours a week at the Marin County Free Library. Again, there was only one place for a book, but all of these books were things people chose to read in their “off” hours. I learned quite a bit about that while re-shelving them.

And what an anti-fragile technology books are! You can read them in the bathtub, on the beach in the sun, while waiting for an appointment, or in your favorite rocker with a cup of tea and a cat on your lap. Admittedly, you are alone while reading, but there is also something about books that brings us together. The stories and ideas they tell ignite our inner worlds and we cannot help but wonder whether our thoughts are shared by others.

And so we have book clubs and author talks in bookstores, podcasts and magazines about books, and libraries full of them, just for the sake of asking. Books are easy to publish now and for some people they are just so much clutter. But every politician must point to a book he or she has written, with or without help. We have got to see the proliferation of books, even the arguments about whether some should be prohibited, as a kind of cultural richness.

Perhaps they don’t bring us together in the same way church services, concerts or sports do, but the books that rise to the top of public consciousness and affect the culture, do bring us together. And libraries can be among the most consequential spaces in a community. According to Pew Research in 2015, 49% of American adults had either visited or used library websites in the past year. In 2024, the American Library Association reports there are 123,627 libraries of all kinds in the United States. Libraries sit there like introverts, not requiring attention, but fully repaying any notice they get.

The towns I grew up in were too small to have libraries, or movie theaters, for that matter. But the schools had shelves at the back of the room full of books, and my high school, during the “space race” was given funding for books. My parents bought books we looked at so often that they fell into tatters. I was never short of food for my imagination. 

Today I am in a book group which meets monthly at the Arroyo Seco Regional Library. It is often pretty quiet there, but there are desks where you can plug in a computer, plus all the resources a modern material and digital collection contains. I like the prescriptive nature of the book club, leading me to read books I might not choose myself. And I like hearing people talk about them. I use the huge array of audiobooks on offer in the Los Angeles library system for my “reading.”

This month, the room we usually use for book group will become a polling place, and the book club will be relegated to the kitchen. This too is evidence of the central place libraries occupy in communities. It makes me happy.

Each of us plots our own journey through the cultural maze which surrounds us, using whatever resources come to hand. Divisiveness seems to be on the rise, but I don’t think we have to participate.

My own attitudes have hardened into an annoying (to some) little lump of happiness lodged in my inner self, which no amount of external misery or hate can dislodge. I think Kamala Harris has it too. And she has the poise and emotional intelligence to represent our country to the world. I have no doubt whatsoever that she will become our next president. “Ain’t it just like a human?” sang Kris Kristofferson. “Here comes that rainbow again.”

Libraries are part of our arsenal of freedom. We all like to read different things. Talking about books helps us to get to know each other. I have felt myself very lucky to have been so involved in books and libraries.