Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

by R. Eric Thomas

Every story, whether truth or fiction, is an invitation to imagination, but even more so, it’s an invitation to empathy. The storyteller says, “I am here. Does it matter?” The words that I found in these books were a person calling out from a page, “I am worthy of being heard and you are worthy of hearing my story.” It seems simple but it’s a bold declaration. How many times in life do we receive the message, implicit or explicit, that what we’ve experienced or what we feel isn’t noteworthy or remarkable? The books that I found in the library, ones that I deeply understood and ones that seemed so outside of my experience they might as well have been written in Klingon, all carried the same hopes: to be seen, to be heard, to exist.

As a lifelong library-goer, I’d always been captivated by the numbers on the spine of every book. I loved that every possible thing, every story, every fact, everything in the universe of knowledge, could be classified. I loved that by understanding the Dewey decimal system, even at a rudimentary level, I gained access to an ever-deepening world of information. Knowing what the ten divisions in the system were and what many of the divisions’ subcategories were made what was often overwhelming and mysterious suddenly comprehensible. A library looks like endless possibility in this way, rather than rows of closed covers. A library is a universe of smaller universes contained within pages, and to me the Dewey decimal system was the key.