Palaces of wonder
Libraries were a very important part of my childhood and my early education. As I’ve often related, my family went through some very hard times when I was a young boy, but my parents scrimped, borrowed, and sold off what they could so I could go to a private school. The idea was that if I could learn things like English well and get good grades, I could be in a better position to help my four younger siblings later in life. Some of those siblings had to go to public schools or even stop schooling for a while just so I could achieve my parents’ dream.
My classmates — many of whom remain lifelong friends — were very kind to me, but since I couldn’t socialize that much with them, I turned to the library for my entertainment, and became a bookworm. I read all kinds of books — not just the Hardy Boys, but books about science, geography, and history, books that inflamed my imagination and made me want to see the world. I wasn’t seriously thinking about becoming a writer yet, but at some point, the transition seemed inevitable and natural.
I wanted to write my own stories. My early efforts — written by hand on bond paper that I had folded and sewn to look like a book — were shameless imitations of the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift, with Boni Avenue in Mandaluyong substituting for Bayport. But without that start, without that library, I would not be where I am today. I wouldn’t have become a writer if I wasn’t a reader first.
As if our school library wasn’t enough, I also became a regular visitor to the Rizal Provincial Library when we moved to Pasig. The books here were more mature, for older readers, and at about 11 or 12 I couldn’t possibly understand some books on the shelves that intrigued me like one by Jean Paul Sartre on “existentialism,” which I borrowed anyway because it, well, made me look and feel smarter than I really was. But libraries remind us, in our most honest moments, of how little we really know, and how much more of the world remains to be discovered.
One thing I remember doing at the Rizal Provincial Library was to stand before the massive Webster’s International Dictionary and flip through its pages to learn at least one new word during each visit — even words like “fennec” (a North African fox), which seems like a useless bit of knowledge even to this day, but which again pushed my imagination over the visible horizon, like knowing about stars that exist that we will never reach.
Social media is intensely focused on the present, and its content passes within days if not minutes; books endure for centuries. And in this age of massive disinformation, books could be the last refuge of truth, because few liars will take the trouble (or have the discipline) to write a book.
In high school and then college, aside of course from our huge main library at UP Diliman, I treasured my visits to the Thomas Jefferson library of the US Embassy and also the British Council Library, where I could nurture my growing interest in literature.
Much later in life, I felt like I had gone to bookworm heaven when I stepped into the Library of Congress (LOC), where I was given special leave to view and examine the 1593 Doctrina Christiana, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Newberry Library, the New York City Public Library, and the libraries at the University of Michigan, where I could read and study books from the 17th century on the shelves. And except perhaps for the LOC — or despite it — nothing beats the British Library in what it holds, from early copies of Beowulf and the Magna Carta to the lyrics of Beatles songs written on napkins.
Our children and young students may not go that far in their pursuit of knowledge or passion, but a library in our smallest and farthest villages can expand their horizons in ways that TikTok and Facebook never will. Of course, I also firmly believe that free and strong Internet access is a requisite to developing a modern society, and every library today should also contain videos and other media. But video tends to make passive receivers of its viewers, while books challenge our minds to create images and make sense of stories.
Social media is also intensely focused on the present, and its content passes within days if not minutes; books endure for centuries. And in this age of massive disinformation, books could be the last refuge of truth, because few liars will take the trouble (or have the discipline) to write a book.
Now living in retirement, I have begun giving boxes of my books away to faraway schools and to students asking for them. In time I will donate the bulk of my personal library to a university that can care for these rare books. Our children don’t need rare books — they need those that generations of children before them have enjoyed, over and over again. With them, even a library with a tin roof and an earthen floor can be a palace of wonder and wisdom in any place without one.
