Drifting Toward the Details
Where would we be without libraries? I know that just the very idea of the library being there, being open again, being active, gives people hope and comfort. So it is a big deal that amid everything the main library in my hometown opened their reimagined, revitalized, and stunningly beautiful downtown building. There are a lot of things to say about how fabulous it is, but because I am that super odd person, today I just want to talk about one small detail of the collection. A particular set of books in a collection called North of 52. Really, I want to talk about details in general and how they act upon us, how they matter.
I have oft quoted W.S. di Piero speaking about wandering in an art gallery and how one might drift toward a detail we love in a painting:
“The mystery of details. The satisfaction of painted particulars. We enter a familiar museum or gallery and go at once (or pretend to drift) to a favourite picture, because in the picture is a detail we love, as we love lines or phrases in poems we can hardly remember the entire drift of.”
“An artist’s concentration is such that certain details will suddenly bear, unexpectedly, a full sense of existence. A hat, an ear, a phrase.”
I think that you know a space is well-designed when you feel the freedom to drift toward a particular detail you love. And I know there will be more details to fall in love with in our new library, but I fell in love with these rows of books, lovingly tended, kept. They put me in touch with a full sense of my existence. I don’t know exactly how. Just reporting the feeling for now.
Maybe I love these books because they remind me of the work of photographer Mickey Smith, and I own one of her small prints that I bought a thousand years ago titled “More Books.”
One thing I know is that I want to go back and sit with these books, the hum of them, the breathing of them. I want to try again to take their likeness, their ordinary bookish beauty. A portrait of a row of books can say so much about us all.
I’ll leave you with a row of telephone books. Think of all the lives in there! All the people that have lived in our city, talked on a phone. A landline phone! But just think of all the souls who come and go in a city, move away, move back, leave this earth, come into being. All of those names of beautiful people who have lived here. Imagine all the conversations and connections that were made between those people listed in these lovely old volumes.
There were a lot of really extremely cool things in the library, but it was this detail that really just. finished. me. off. How thankful I am for it.
