The Library Book

by Susan Orlean

We were very much a reading family, but we were a borrow-a-book-from-the-library family more than a bookshelves-full-of-books family.

It becomes harder all the time to think of places that welcome everyone and don’t charge any money for that warm embrace.

Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived. It is something that no one else can entirely share, one that burns down and disappears when we die. But if you can take something

from that internal collection and share it—with one person or with the larger world, on the page or in a story recited—it takes on a life of its own.

Jews believe books are more than just printed documents; they believe books have a kind of humanity and a soul.

“Books invite all; they constrain none.”

But a library can’t be the institution we hope for it to be unless it is open to everyone.

A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone. The library is a whispering post.

It declares that all these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past and to what is still to come.