Circular Cruises/A Childhood In Libraries

A Childhood In Libraries

9 October 1998

I was a very young reader.

I was reading some adult fiction while in elementary school; I had already worked my way through most of the stuff that interested me at the lower levels. I remember going to the public library and being the only child in the adult section, which gets you these odd looks of bewilderment and amusement from the grown-ups, especially when they see that you're actually getting books from the shelves and not looking for your mother.

You had to get parental permission to shop in the adult stacks. I never understood that. I thought they were trying to keep the kids from being frustrated by the difficulty of the books. It didn't occur to me until years later (really! Not until high school!) that it was probably a sex/violence/nudity issue. My family didn't think that way.

I was not particularly picky. I'd pick up a few books in the adult section, then in the section for the kids, then go into the section for the little kids - Dr. Seuss and such - and see if they had anything new there. I just wanted the material that I liked; the difficulty of the word was never a problem. The only difference between a Heinlein adult and a Heinlein juvenile was that I finished the latter more quickly - and, truth be told, the fact that some of the Heinlein books were juveniles was, again, something I didn't catch onto until years later.

The library didn't have a policy about how many books to check out. My personal policy was that I be able to carry them to the car and into the house in one trip. That usually meant a full armful, as tall a stack as I could handle. That would last about a week. No, seriously. Today I can still read a typical murder mystery, if I sit down and absorb myself in it fully, in about an hour. The problem is finding a free hour.

This may be why I liked the movie Matilda so much. (The book never really impressed me - which is odd, since it's Roald Dahl - and I credit young actress Mara Wilson with a lot of the difference.)

Everyone around Matilda is rude, crude, and revels in stupidity - her parents won't let her go to school, they don't see a point in it - and she is beginning to think the whole world's like that, that maybe it's her that's weird.

When she discovers the library, it's her light and her salvation. She spends the whole day in the library reading. Finally, after watching this for a few weeks, the librarian says to her, "You know, if you get a library card, you can take the books home." And Matilda's face right then is exactly the reaction I would have had: You mean, all this, and I can take them home too?

The problem with the film - and the reason the film functions as wish fulfillment for me, even as an adult - is that Matilda manages to have friends despite the fact that she's got intelligence; other kids in school like her.

In fact, the other little kids she goes to school with (once she actually gets to school) enjoy absorbing new information as much as she does. School is what she always dreamed it would be: A place where people exercise their minds and fill them with ideas.

But school isn't really like that. Elementary school for me was hell; worse than high school, in fact. By high school I had built up the layer of psychological armor that gets in my way so much today. In elementary school I was nude, exposed, and it was a big shock to find out that most kids didn't really care to learn anything, they just wanted to sit around and burp at each other.

It was an even worse shock to find out that because I did want to accumulate information, I was The Alien and a psychological punching bag.

I eventually ended up in a program for "gifted" students, which I still feel is a misnomer. I don't consider myself especially gifted. Has the definition of intelligence shrunk so far that anyone who makes even a half-hearted attempt at filling their brain is "gifted?"

Gifted kids were the ones who could draw perfectly or could do calculus while still in elementary school - and I met a lot of those; I was in the bottom of my class through most of high school, which should tell you where my peers were. I may not be gifted, but I'm not stupid either.

Me, I just liked to read books. And not the books they wanted me to read. I liked SF, tales of the fantastic, tales of the extraordinary, and mystery stories.

Being among "gifted" students was not much of a help. It just left me with the feeling that I had been placed in a refugee camp with other aliens. It was a little easier to fit in there, but I knew that outside of the fences nothing had changed.

Later, I learned that there were others who had the same history of alienation, for the same reasons. You'd think that would be comforting. It wasn't.

While it was nice not to be the only one who had suffered this way, it became a new problem - I felt like the world had heard that particular whine before, and I didn't feel entitled to fuss about it anymore. It no longer had even the virtue of uniqueness.

So I trained myself to not mention it at all.

If someone asks me about my elementary/secondary education, I generally dodge the subject. If pressed - say, if someone traces one of my references, like talking about Pinter plays or the allegory of the you-know-what, and concludes that my childhood schooling was Not The Norm - I say "I had good teachers" or some noncommittal statement like that.

I never claim to have been "gifted." To do so would either make me an egotist, like some of these polyglot academics who write Dante dissertations in their spare time, or a freak of nature. I am neither.

Despite all this scarring, I have never lost my essential love for libraries. I don't go to them much anymore - I can afford to buy books now, and I love to keep books. You might say I've moved beyond the library into a more serious stage of book love.

But I adore libraries, and a library charity is likely to get my bucks even when nothing else does. Life, to me, is nothing without books.

I see a populace where no one reads, and I don't understand it. Everyone in my family reads for recreation, at least a little bit. My sister is not a devout reader, the way my mother and I are, but even she has her favorite authors and books. What possible common ground can I have with people who have literally never picked up a book they weren't required to read?

The Boston Public Library gets a lot of little kids. Schools in Boston often don't have good libraries of their own, so the kids end up there to get books for book reports and so on. I watch these children coming up the library steps, approaching that massive doorway.

Nineteen out of twenty have that forced-march look on their face, as if they are traversing the seventh circle of hell, and I have no idea what can be done to change the way they think, or even if it's possible.

The twentieth child is the Matilda. She (and it's usually a she) has a look of wonder. She knows she is entering the place where all the ideas are kept. And I look at that child and I can't be happy. I think, Kid, you are in for rough waters ahead. I hope you make it with some of that intact.

Despite my cynicism - and the tone of doom and anguish above - I have managed to keep most of my sense of wonder. I've done pretty well with it. It doesn't come out in these pages much, because I only let it out in my fiction, where it's safe. (Have you ever noticed that it's okay for an adult to believe the most outrageous things if you put a "fiction" sign on it?)

But I have done so at the expense of a lot of other things - and on retrospect, sometimes I wonder if I made the right tradeoffs. Was it a battle worth fighting?

I usually think it was.

Copyright © October 1998. All rights reserved.