An Awfully Big Blog Adventure: Quiet

I know this is heresy, but I have a gripe about libraries.

I love libraries (I wrote a whole blog post about how much I love libraries). I love librarians! I was a librarian! Libraries meant a lot to me growing up and one of the reasons for this was that, not only were there books, but the library was silent.

We all fully subscribe to the idea that libraries are vital in providing books for kids whose houses contain no books, but I think people forget that quiet may also be one of their children’s needs, and some houses contain absolutely none of it. Worse, I think the need for quiet is not only overlooked, it’s positively stigmatized these days.

In fact, it seems like the only way to get any quiet is to get yourself chucked in ‘isolation’ in school, a place I would have embraced wholeheartedly had it existed when I was young. If you are a shy, introverted person then chances are you already spend a large portion of your life (basically any situation involving other people) feeling like a failure and a weirdo. I still feel like this. Every single day. And now you also have to be labelled ‘bad’ to get some peace?

said no introvert ever

I spent most of my teenage years hiding in my room because I just wanted some quiet. My poor parents (who were very well-meaning) wanted to take me to a shrink. Even I believed there must be something terribly wrong with me. There wasn’t. Except for worrying there was something terribly wrong with me, I was perfectly happy. I just liked to be alone. Some people do.

Lovely comic about Introversion

Even now, when I start work in a new campus, the first thing I do is seek out the quietest, emptiest place I can eat lunch, read or write. Often, there isn’t one.

Libraries these days are not quiet. And when I was working there, every new initiative to ‘get people into libraries’ felt to me like libraries apologising for themselves (in much the same way quiet people are constantly apologising for themselves).

"Come to the library, we have computers and clubs and flatscreen noticeboards (oh, and there are some books and stuff but you can ignore those) and you don’t even have to be quiet, it’s not the 19^th century here anymore!"

As though the act of reading has changed one iota since the 19^th century. You still need a bit of peace to do it.

And don’t get me wrong, the computers and clubs are great (the flatscreen noticeboards are a big eco-unfriendly waste of space). I just think that it’s the books and the reading that should be the main point of a library. The sacrosanct bit. The bit you design everything else around. Not the bit you apologise for and compensate for by providing fancy coffee machines. The entire world is designed for noisy coffee lovers, why can’t we keep this one little bit of it quiet?

And why would anyone give the books a second glance if even the library treats them like an old-fashioned afterthought and not the main freaking event? It seems like every flashy refurb results in fewer books and less quiet. What kind of message does that send about what we value?

A quiet library would be a lot cheaper than paying for writing retreats too. When I needed a quiet place to write because of noisy neighbours, I had to pay to join the university library because the public libraries were so noisy. University libraries are completely silent. If university study is the goal for our kids, maybe they should be exposed to that kind of environment a little earlier. It might even up their chances of getting there in the first place.

Wow, this got ranty. Soz.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this but if I don’t reply right away, forgive me, I’m off on a family holiday. (18 of us. Pray for me.)