As I make plans for the new year, “Destination Reading” is a top priority in 2025: something I want to build other goals around to support reading and book-focused travel.
One of my goals is to make progress visiting public libraries. I want to explore as many libraries as I possibly can going forward, in as many different places as possible.
Is 2025 going to be the year I check off dozens of libraries?
Probably not.
Two people in our immediate family are coming to the end of their lives, so my bookworm introvert travel adventures are probably going to have to take a backseat to death and dying and the practical necessities I need to bone up on making secure in my own midlife, and for the sake of my wife working way too much overtime.
Right now I’m browsing google maps, looking at libraries along the way of a road trip I’m taking my elderly mom on soon to visit her friend who is also declining rapidly; this may be the last time they spend with each other on this plane or whatever you want to call it. While they are hanging out I want to be prepared to check out at least one new-to-me public library in the vicinity.
As I look at these libraries and consider them as individual spots within a huge catalog of libraries in this nation and continent, I’m realizing that the more of them I visit, the more they are going to start looking the same. The more they will probably begin to blur together. How am I going to keep them separate in my memories? I mean … if they all wind up feeling the same, is there really a purpose in trying to visit as many of them as I can?
So far in life I haven’t really gone to all that many libraries so it’s pretty easy for me to recall each one I’ve been to and things that make them distinctive: what city they are located in, why I wound up there in the first place, and their layout, vibes, and special features. But if I start going to more places, traveling exactly as the introvert bookworm destination reader I want to be, with visiting libraries as my “thing”, I might want to have a structured plan for what I want to consistently note with each library I visit.
Writing this, I’m second-guessing myself and this desire I’m having right now to create a system for how I approach each new library I visit; maybe it’s best to just wander and let the journey I take through libraries evolve organically. Maybe making a system or a procedure will suck all of the magic out of visiting libraries. Maybe I’m supposed to begin experiencing libraries as all part of one same Universal Library – maybe that is the spiritual beauty I want to experience through this lifelong adventure of going through a long list of libraries I aim to tick off.
I know I want to make note of the landscape around and touching each library. Whether there is a garden … anything growing on the land the library sits on. How far the tendrils of sanctuary extend from the main building. At what point you know you are “at the library” before you have actually stepped inside.
Right now I am thinking of a library I went to this year in a faraway place I hadn’t ever intended to travel to. I went there because of an extraordinary celestial event, with no time or intention set aside for exploring libraries. But I happened to be walking by this big library, and the doors opened to me … so I went inside.
I’d only been standing in the high-ceilinged library lobby for a moment, absorbing the posted resources and a few people making use of them, when a security guard demanded to know what I was doing there.
I had trespassed on the library while it was closed.
But I did go to that library. I can feel and smell the colors and the space of it now, eight months later. Even the limited amount of time I was there and what little of its space I penetrated. It invited me in, and it held me for a minute even as it let me know it was not for me: not on that day, at that time. But it is a library and it is there. It is there for those people, and they need it. I was there for a minute and I walked all around and around it and read the words on it and listened to the music it was playing.
Maybe that is why I do not want too much of a plan. I might still be going places I don’t really want to go all that much, for reasons that are not just to collect what I have on my own personal pre-formed lists. Because my mom needs someone to drive her to say goodbye to her friend. Because the sun may be eclipsed by the moon for four minutes and I might be lucky enough to go to Dallas: glad for it. Because The Library is a sanctuary that is not always open. And in 2025 we may begin to see public libraries and a whole lot of sanctuaries set on fire and shut down and closed and who even knows. Who really fucking knows.
I started watching a documentary about a book-writing book-lover and his library. In Italian he said something about Dante saying something like God is a library.
I’ve never read Dante and I don’t speak Italian but I am sure this is true.
How much of a plan do we really need when we step into the embodied God?