“The library card is a passport to wonders and miracles, glimpses into
other lives, religions, experiences, the hopes and dreams and strivings of ALL
human beings, and it is this passport that opens our eyes and hearts to the
world beyond our front doors, that is one of our best hopes against tyranny,
xenophobia, hopelessness, despair, anarchy and ignorance.”
The library card took us to the hardest part of the Grimm’s forest, a
place where the house tasted sweet and the oven was for us; to the oddest
corners of Lear’s Gladstone bag, where meaningless words turned themselves into
complete sense; to the softest landing in Sendak’s dream city, where arguments
are resolved by music and you actually meet yourself.
The library card is the smallest page in our wallet and gives access
to pages of practicality held together by spiral plastic, American-cut pages of
confident prose balanced by unspoken margins, shiny pages of eye-pleasing
belief from the history of worldly art, convoluted arrow pages of fix-it
manuals folding out into tables of repair, pages of maps all coastline and
alps.
The library card is a ticket to the idea we reached for earlier, the
philosophy we thought must exist but couldn’t see now, the logic that isn’t
like steps in a rational puzzle but leaps from emotion to meaning and back
again, the conclusions we know are more than destinations more like the
terminus for our next direction, the poetry to be found in the ordinary inarticulate.
The library card is a creased rectangle to the great globe of our and
everything’s strivings, a brutal barcode to the transparent beauties
transported in simulacra, our overfamiliar name and same old address searching
out anyone anywhere anytime anyhow, a string of numbers that is not us say the
loans we take and never will be us whatever a computer might think, say the
loans.
The library card slips under the radar of cyberspace, cannot be
tracked by known or unknown security agencies, could be someone else borrowing
the same material, is interchangeable when interfacing with technology, floats
in the top pocket untraceable by satellite or drone, suits itself what is
listed under its unique status, serves as a bookmark and DVD chisel.
The library card is the strangely exact compact with everything
written no longer in a bookshop, everything written by strangers down the
street, hours of music the radio forgot, festivals of film the television only
dreams about, kinds of talking you don’t hear down the shops, somewhere you
would rather be, someone you would rather be with just for now.
The original quote is by Libba
Bray, via Talitha Fraser.