Libraries

Joey Carlson
MSMU Class of 2025

(6/2023) It was just before my last week of school at about midnight, and I found myself laying on the floor of the library in between bookcases. The day had probably been the worst day of the semester, but at the end of it all, I still had pages to write, some inhumane amount. I realized, looking up at all the books, that the world of academia was large, and I realized too, that, for the most part, these books would help very few people even though they were the product of so much sweat and heartache. If I desired to continue on, I would become like the hoards of academics who waste their work on issues unrelated to their first loves, subjects in their discipline so far removed from the soul of their discipline that they become unintelligible to themselves.

I go back and forth on this; right now, I am not in a library surrounded by foreign books, but in my personal library, the fledgling efforts of my mind to grow up, surrounded by many books which I love and have begun to understand. Some of these books sit simply as an inheritance of some kind, and they attest at the very least to the kindness of loved ones and mentors who tried their best to treat my young mind. In the beginning, this was all I had in my library.

Some of these books are the product of my avarice, because before college, I imagined all books to be good, books one has read to be better, and I had very few other categories. So, I collected them at the expense of quality; I have since realized that the mark of a good library is simply quality. If a person’s library consisted of a single bookcase, but every book in this one bookcase was a true and holy classic (in the least restrictive sense), such a person could be very healthy and happy.

Of these precipitating categories I have begun to separate the wheat from the chaff, and there in fact was far more chaff than wheat.

My library has more books that I have not read than I have. For a young mind, this is crucial; so long as one avoids the chaff, he can gain a great deal from looking at unread books. They remind him that he is in fact small, and that the body of human knowledge is very large, that far larger than this is reality, and that God stands separate from it all as indiscernibly great and magnificent. The young mind will kill itself intellectually with egoism if it does not know that it is small. When a man grows old, there is less time left to learn, and ideally, time has already proven to him over and over again that he is small; so there may be a decreased need to own unread books (though this last point may be false, since all minds need to learn, the old as well as the young).

Few books sit as trophies which I have defeated; for the mind is a difficult thing, and a good book defeated however many years ago stands novel once again in the present. The books I have defeated are almost always truly adversaries, and they are so because they are the least useful, and are the least deserving of further reading.

Some books are not classics but are dear to me anyways, sometimes for no good reason; as a brief example, I have a book by a certain E.O. Wilson, which I read early in high school, knowing nothing of the author (I now know enough about him to know that I disagree with him over vast areas of knowledge, above all on the metaphysical level), which captivated my young mind in a very innocent way. Many who know much about the diabolical nature of some authors might be tempted to withhold such books from young people, and frankly I find this argument appealing; but a young person truthfully is not easily lured into materialism when he trusts a holy alternative. I now know that I read so many books in public school whose whole purpose for existing was malevolent, and I, as a young Christian, not understanding the cosmic metaphysical battles waging around me, took from them what was true, and simply set the rest aside. E.O. Wilson’s book is not worth reading in the slightest, for it contains false ideas, and even the science is outdated, but it contained information I might have found elsewhere that was so interesting, and such things were enough for me. The mind craves truth, and it will take it from whatever body it can, whether it happens upon a little pond or a great ocean. We are made for this ocean, certainly, and the ponds would dry up without it, but the ponds are still good all the same. The truth can never really be integrated with lies; it always stands separate, and young people will easily ignore the lies without even giving them a second thought, unless they have been otherwise taught to believe them.

Last of all, there are those books which, in a strange sense, share a part of my soul. These may be old or young; they are always old and young to me. Whether I am currently reading them or not, they sit most adjacent to my bed and to my desk, as a reminder of who I am. You will inevitably become like the books that you read (this is in fact the argument against my words about E.O Wilson), and you should always keep your dearest books close enough to affect you deeply, but far enough away to really have something new and separate to offer you.

This little library offers something of an answer to my questions about the purpose of academia. In the same way that a single, good conversation with a single, good person is imminently useful, so authoring a single, good book, even if it were read by a single person, would in fact be useful. What that says about the expansive academic shelves, I do not know; it does, however, tell me that there is room for a small author in such a large world.

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