Day One: The Meaning of the Word

Well, my first day as an apprentice librarian was interesting. I showed up at 8:00 in Mr. Phillips' office--and what a lovely office, by the way, with a huge wooden desk and leather chair, and the walls lined with wooden shelves filled to the brim with old books, plus stacks of books on the desk--and reported for my new duty. Phillips seemed distracted at first, looking around for something, and didn't seem to notice when I walked in. I cleared my throat and he said, "Oh, there you are,"--as though I were just the thing he had been looking for--"do have a seat, young man."

I sat nervously in a plush armchair facing his desk. I waited another minute or so as he continued to ruffle through papers and books. "Ah! There it is!" he said at last, triumphantly holding a small red volume that I had been eyeing absently ever since I sat down. "Have you ever read Virgil?"

Embarrassedly, I said, "Um... no, can't say that I have, sir."

"What? You studied literature in school and they never gave you Virgil?"

"Technically, I was an English major. Virgil, if I'm not mistaken, is Latin."

"And I suppose you never took Latin?"

"Uh... no. No, sir."

Phillips shook his head in disbelief. "I say, what do the universities teach anymore? No Greek, no Latin! How can they take themselves seriously as supposed institutions of higher education? Harvard! Yale! What jokes they have become!"

I sat silently, feeling as inadequate as ever I had, intimidated by the great librarian and his towering intellect. If he could scoff at Harvard and Yale, how pathetic must I have seemed, with my state-university bachelor's degree in English Lit?

"But none of this is your fault, my boy," said Phillips. "You are merely the victim of the laughable state to which our educational system has fallen. No one who goes to college in this day and age receives a real education. It's simply appalling. But let's move on." (I sighed with relief at that change of subject.) "So you really want to become a librarian?"

"Yes, sir. I trust that you can teach me how."

"Very well. Let's start with the fundamentals, shall we? Isn't that the way education usually works? You start with the fundamentals, and move on to the... the higher..." [he swirled his hand, trying to come up with the word] "...well, whatever. You know what I mean." He gazed at me seriously. "Do you know what the word library means?"

Was this a trick question? "Uh... well, at the very least, it's a place where there are lots of books."

"Exactly!" He sat up emphatically. "A place where there are lots of books! Not computers, not Web sites and blogs, not, God forbid,video games... but books! The word library, young man, comes from the Latin word liber. Do you know what that means?"

"Book?" I ventured.

"Precisely! The word book is at the very heart of the word library. My goodness, library basically just means the book room! Not the computer lab! Not the Internet cafe! Not the video game arcade! Not Blockbuster Video! The book room!"

I nodded, hardly daring to speak.

"Here, let me show you something." I followed Mr. Phillips out of his office, into the main reading room, and into the stacks. He pulled an old volume at random off the shelf and thrust it in my face. "Smell!"

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me! Smell it!"

I sniffed. The dust almost made me sneeze, but I caught it.

"Do you know what that smell is, young man?"

I wanted to say dust, but guessed that would have been the wrong answer. "What?"

"That," he said, "is the smell of knowledge." He held the book to his nostrils and inhaled deeply.

I never knew knowledge had a distinct aroma, but I took his word for it. He, after all, was the great librarian Walter J. Phillips.

"Look around you. Do you know where you are?"

Again, I surmised that the obvious answer was not the correct one.

"You are standing," he said, "in the Republic of Letters. Do you know who are the citizens of that noble republic?"

"Who?"

"All those who have written great books, the poets and philosophers, the novelists and playwrights, historians, scientists, political thinkers, you name it... all those who have taken part in the Great Conversation, those who have spoken their parts in the great drama of human civilization, and moved on to let others take the stage. And the library is where you come to take part, to kneel at the feet of the brightest and best minds of history, to learn from the greats! This is where education takes place, young man."

I nodded, overwhelmed by his passionate outburst.

"You see all these books? Each one of these books embodies a living person, a great man or woman who had something to say to the world, and said it! Most of them are gone, but their voices remain, recorded in the pages of these books, ready to speak to you if you only turn the page."

I stared around me at all the books on all the shelves. It was almost spooky, imagining that in each one was someone's voice, someone's mind, all waiting silently for me--for anyone--to listen. Standing dwarflike in that immense sea of knowledge, I came to feel viscerally the magnitude of my ignorance, and at the same time an awakening desire to acquire as much of that knowledge as I could. This was more exciting and more meaningful than acquiring economic wealth... there before me, as though a newly discovered country, was a whole world of intellectual riches that was free for the asking.

Mr. Phillips explained to me that librarians, being keepers of the books, should make it their business to know the books, and expressed his opinion that reading should take up a considerable amount of the librarian's time. In view of my poor education, he took sympathy and assigned me to read from the classics--in English translation--for the remainder of the day.