Libraries: Beyond the Book

There is wonderful line in the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, based on the novel by Patrick O’Brian.  The setting is during the Napoleonic Wars, and the British Captain Jack Aubrey (played superbly by Russell Crowe) is in pursuit of the Asheron, a mighty French war ship. A young sailor presents the Captain with a model of the hull of the Asheron.  Captain Aubrey examines the model and exclaims, “That’s the future!  What a fascinating and marvelous age we live in!”

 I love this moment in the movie, because his observation captures the sentiment and excitement every generation experiences.  Indeed, what a fascinating and marvelous age we live in. What an extraordinary moment in human history, with the almost instantaneous transmission of information, ideas, and dialogue between people from every corner of the globe. Information is flowing like a giant river where everyone can drink; if you have access to the technology.

For almost five thousand years, if we include the clay tablets that filled the libraries of Mesopotamia, books have represented the life of the human mind.  Books have provided the physical record of human knowledge, the noblest ideas, the detailed inventories, our stories, poems, literature, and religious beliefs.  For many of us, books exert a powerful force in our lives.  Books are companions, illuminators, shaping who we are and what we believe.  Theodore Roosevelt once said “I am a part of everything I have read.”

Historically, libraries have been collections of books and materials logically organized to facilitate access.  However, if you go beyond the idea of physical collections of items to the underlying principals; the public library is a civic building constructed for the purpose of allowing every citizen a neutral public place to access knowledge, learn, think, write, create intellectual content, exchange ideas, and engage in a dialog. 

A successful democracy demands an informed and educated citizenry, and the library ensures everyone equal opportunity and access to information, regardless of income or origin.  In a new International City Managers Association survey, with support provided by the Gates Foundation, 22% of Americans surveyed identified public libraries as their “sole source for computers and internet resources.”  Of all the people surveyed, 30% (a projected 77 million), use public library computers and wireless networks. Almost 70% of Americans (169 million) describe themselves as library users. At the Chesapeake Public Library, citizens book over 50,000 one hour computer slots every month and the demand exceeds the supply.

When I think of the writings of Aristotle and Plato, I have an image of men strolling together through the streets of Athens, engaged in lively and reasoned discourse. The Greeks created an intellectual forum which promoted education, dialog, enlightenment, and the exchange of different ideas. Democracy. This ideal is embodied by the modern public library. 

"The School of Athens" by Raphael

Libraries are the public civic place for self actualization, for participating in Aristotle’s metaphorical strolling conversation with his students and colleagues through the streets of Athens.  Collections of materials have been a means to that end, but not really the foundation for the institution as so many of us have assumed.  Books have always been synonymous with libraries, but that doesn’t have to be the case.  If books as we know and love them cease to be published in their traditional format, we still need public libraries.  The delivery and format of ideas may change. The mission of free public access to knowledge, reading, learning, thinking, writing, creating, debating and exchanging ideas must continue.

This month the Library is adding three thousand downloadable e-books to the library catalog.  In July, the Library will begin to add downloadable audio books as well.  Patrons can download these books to their home computers and compatible e-book readers for a two week period before the item is automatically deleted at the end of the checkout period.  Last year, Amazon’s sales of e-books topped the sale of traditional books for the first time.  Downloadable books may be the next major wave as publishing houses and bookstores struggle with the expense of producing, shipping, and housing the increasingly expensive printed volume. I hope that the book as we know and love it will continue, but whatever format knowledge adopts, libraries will adapt.

In a recent interview with Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, he confesses to being a serious bibliophile.  Richards owns so many thousands of books that he has considered “professional training” to learn the Dewey Decimal System to organize his collection. He goes on to say, “When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you.  The public library is a great equalizer.”  Rock on Keith.  To paraphrase another musician, Neil Young, rock and roll and libraries are here to stay.

Swamp Lit

                                    “The Lake of the Dismal Swamp” (Historic Print)

The Great Dismal Swamp is America’s most famous swamp, drawing poets, novelists, journalists, naturalists, and painters to its black, primordial waters. Some of the greatest literary names of the last two centuries have paid homage to its mysterious allure; including Edgar Allen Poe, William Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sir Thomas Moore and Robert Frost. All of these writers penned vivid descriptions of the Swamp, ranging from sinister to glorious, and dismal to dream-like.

Each generation brought their own unique cultural perspective to the Swamp. In 1728, Colonel William Byrd II wrote an account of leading a surveying party to help set the state boundary line. From Byrd’s viewpoint, as the owner of the large and prosperous Wakefield Plantation, there was absolutely nothing redeeming about the swamp. Byrd, a rational 18th century pragmatist,  estimated that it would take a full decade just to drain and clear the bog for farmland.  

Byrd’s dismissal of the terrain as “Dismal” actually became synonymous with the word swamp. His account noted, “that whole distance was through a miry cedar bog, where the ground trembled below their feet most mightily” and they had “a dread of laying their bones in a bog that would spew them up again.”

(Photo Source: “The Dismal Swamp, Canoeing Sketches” by John Boyle O'Reilley)

Nonetheless, the Dismal Swamp quickly became known as one of the great natural phenomena of the new country, and George Washington, Patrick Henry, James Monroe and Andrew Jackson all made the pilgrimage to the cypress lined shores. Tales of the swamp circulated throughout the educated world; and in 1803, Sir Thomas Moore, Irish poet and British Consul to Bermuda, found his way to Lake Drummond. Moore then retreated to Norfolk to write, “A Ballad: The Lake of the Dismal Swamp”, with its famous opening refrain:

“They made her a grave, too cold and damp
For a soul so warm and true;
And she’s gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp,
Where, all night long, by a fire-fly lamp,
She paddles her white canoe.”

The Age of Reason had given way to the romantic sensibilities of the 19th century. Not surprisingly, the macabre Edgar Allen Poe was drawn to the swamp’s dark and sinister qualities. Poe traveled the canal, and his feverish imagination described it as “the boundary of the dark, horrible, lofty” forest. An unsubstantiated story credits him with penning parts of his most famous poem, “The Raven,” at the notorious Halfway Hotel, so-called because it straddled the North Carolina and Virginia State Line in the swamp. Poe was a known guest at the Halfway Hotel, which was the scene of many marriages, duels, and other dubious assignations.

“The Hotel at Lake Drummond” (Historic Print)

In his poem “The Lake,” Poe describes a sunset visit to the shore of a lake haunted by the ghosts of two lovers. Lake Drummond is believed to be the lake based on the physical description, with the wet cypress roots along the shoreline resembling black rocks.

“In spring of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less--
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound
And the tall pines that towered around.”

The dark interiors of the Swamp were rumored to have been a refuge for local and runaway slaves dating  back to the 1600’s. The accuracy of stories about large colonies of slaves in the Dismal Swamp are debated by scholars, but slaves certainly sought refuge in the swamp. The waterways have been designated by the National Park Service as a site of the Underground Railway Network. The horror of slavery set against the backdrop of the menacing, mysterious landscape captured the imagination of poets, writers, and painters.

Longfellow’s poem, “Slave in the Dismal Swamp”,  portrayed the suffering of humans seeking freedom.  In 1856, a fictitious account in Harper’s Weekly by David Strother, told the story of the legendary “Osman,” who protected runaway slaves in the swamp. This account provided the inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s second anti-slavery novel, “Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp” in 1856; following the enormously successful “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, the first American novel to sell a million copies.

By 1893, naturalist accounts began to make their appearance, such as, “The Dismal Swamp, Canoeing Sketches” by John Boyle O’Reilly. The book features charming photographs of the excursion, and detailed accounts of the flora and fauna. The Nineteenth Century ended on a suitably romantic footnote. Poe’s poem, “The Lake”, captured the imagination of a young Robert Frost in 1894. Rebuffed by his sweetheart, a heartbroken Robert Frost decided to come to Virginia and wander around the swamp hopelessly until he perished. Fortunately, he was discovered, returned home, and married the object of his earlier angst.

(Photo: “The Dismal Swamp, Canoeing Sketches" by John Boyle O'Reilley)

Americans in the early 20th century, now in the era of the exuberant Teddy Roosevelt, set out to explore the swamp as naturalists and adventurers. The appreciation of the swamp as a rare and important wilderness area continues with volumes such as Bland Simpson’s, “The Great Dismal, a Carolinian’s Swamp Memoir” (1998), and our very own naturalist librarian Karen Kearney, with her new blog, “On the Wing.”  The Great Dismal Swamp, Chesapeake’s greatest treasure, continues to provide a stunning contrast to our busy, modern suburban life, providing a deep, ancient, and primordial call of the wild.

(Photo Source: “The Dismal Swamp, Canoeing Sketches" John Boyle O'Reilley)

Betsy Fowler