The Library — and More!
June 29, 2019
A Peaceful Read, George Goodwin Kilburne; 1869
Today’s cutting-edge libraries function as part of a mopping-up campaign to extinguish whatever small fragments of imagination children might have left after having been bombarded by thousands of colorful flashing pictures on screens throughout their infancy.
ALAN writes:
“Imagination Lives Here” is a pet slogan of the St. Louis Public Library. It can be seen on library trucks. It is part of the aggressive novelty-and-marketing frame of mind by which American libraries are now run. I think it is good for a laugh.
A hundred years ago, “library” meant a storehouse of books, including the best that had been thought and written. That was enough to attract grown-ups and children alike. But to the modern anti-mind, enough is never enough. It is a measure of the American passion for excess that people who run libraries today look upon that idea as old-fashioned—by which they mean: inexpressibly horrible. Instead, they favor aggressive sales ploys like free concerts, movies, games, coloring books, crayons, comic books, ‘zine making, and prizes for reading books. This fact alone proves that we are living in an alternate universe. And isn’t it so much better?, they say. And isn’t it so much Folderol?, I say.
At this point, someone will object: But don’t libraries today discharge their traditional function of making books and periodicals available? Of course they do, and they do it very well. But that is part of the revolutionary stratagem of one step back, two steps forward. That is how the Fabians have it rigged. It is as if they said to Americans: You may continue to use libraries qua libraries, but at the same time we will use them to help advance the Permanent Revolution. And have no doubt that American libraries are now run by feminists and Fabian change agents.
That is bad enough and should tell us all we need to know about the philosophical-political slant of people who run libraries.
Equally bad is the pandering to the eye, which is very different from an appeal to the moral-philosophical-esthetic-intellectual capacity of mind and thought that was part of the traditional identity of libraries. Pandering to the eye is now excused because entire generations of Americans have grown up staring at screens and are therefore stuck on what can be seen instead of what can be thought. Books in libraries are now displayed face-out, as in book stores that pander to the lowest common denominator. Most of them are hip, cute, ironic, shocking, and cutting-edge cool.
I can remember a time in the retail world when stores began giving themselves cutesy names and tacking on the words And More. Since the people who run libraries are no longer standard-bearers but fad followers, how could they not transform their libraries into Books—And More?
I have no objection to amusement parlors, fun houses, and entertainment centers. But I want them to be called by those names, not by the word Library. In other words, I want a library to be what it has always been. The modernist anti-mind cannot understand such naked simplicity. The modernist anti-mind hates limits and boundaries. Its guiding ethos is: And More. Enough is never enough. For a thing to be what it is is never enough. For books to be what they are is never enough. There must always be: And More.
“Imagination Lives Here” may have been true a hundred years ago. Today it is perhaps 10% true and 90% a lie conceived and promoted by aggressive marketers. If truth were their goal, their slogan would be: “Imagination is Extinguished Here.”
Let me qualify that last. To be fair, it would be more accurate to say that today’s cutting-edge libraries function as part of a mopping-up campaign to extinguish whatever small fragments of imagination children might have left after having been bombarded by thousands of colorful flashing pictures on television screens throughout their infancy.
Consider the so-called “children’s literature” departments. To cover themselves, those who run such departments allow a few older volumes of classic stories for children to remain on the shelves. But they are hidden in a sea of hundreds of newer books carefully and purposely crafted to catch the naïve brain and eye of children. Such rooms also include “play areas” and screens. An observer from another planet would see that such things are there not to encourage the childhood capacity for imagination and wonder but to obstruct it or overwhelm it. No children are capable even of recognizing, let alone resisting, the tidal wave of distraction and amusement that is designed and intended to engulf them whenever they walk into a modern library, and most of their elders are not much better.
In 2012, Lawrence Auster and his readers addressed the irony that we see and hear everywhere in the ordeal of modern life. [“The Soft Bigotry of Ubiquitous Irony,” View From the Right, January 2, 2012]
Cuteness and irony also abound in modern libraries for the purpose of showing everyone how hip and cool they are.
Children are neither cute nor ironic, and they should be kept away from people who think it fine and dandy for them to become that way. The chance for children to discover the joy in reading—meaning: in words and abstract thought—will always yield to the sensate in gadgets, pictures, and screens, a cultural trend that philosopher Richard Weaver saw coming and wrote about in the 1940s. In such a setting, parents have little chance of guiding their children safely between the Scylla and Charybdis of computer screens, movies, music, and comic books on one side and people sitting there with wires coming out of their head and staring at little screens on the other.
All such things are radical departures from what American libraries traditionally provided: A quiet setting for the cultivation of reading, contemplation, and the beginnings of abstract thought, all of which require undistracted attention and the power of childhood imagination.
Writing about the years 1865 to 1870 in the Public School Library in St. Louis, a librarian noted that “absolute silence is enforced” in the Reading Room, “from which illustrated literature is excluded…” [St. Louis Public Library Annual Report, 1913-1914, p. 61 ] Try to find such a setting in today’s hip, cool libraries. Enforcing the silence and excluding the pictures are ideas the modernist anti-mind cannot imagine even in the very place where such people have the effrontery to claim “Imagination Lives.”
Books, chairs, tables, and quiet—that is what American libraries offered to citizens a hundred years ago. It was—and is—all that is needed to cultivate imagination. It also, not incidentally, encouraged the ability to sit quietly in a room (Pascal). Movies, gadgets, and screens do not cultivate imagination; they discourage it as surely as they discourage the ability to sit quietly in a room.
Astronomer Leslie Peltier wrote of his boyhood in Ohio a hundred years ago:
“We had games, we had pets, we had projects, and we had a multitude of hobbies. Best of all, we had lots of books, for we all loved to read…. We were a family of readers…. Nearly every evening…, Mother would read aloud to the whole family…. We learned to value books and to treat them with respect…..”
[Leslie Peltier, Starlight Nights: The Adventures of a Star-Gazer, Harper & Row, 1965, pp. 30-33]
Betty Pavlige wrote about her childhood in St. Louis in the 1920s-‘30s:
“Since there was no radio or TV, books from the library were part of another world for me, a world in which I lingered after going to bed, forcing myself to stay awake and recalling what I had read that day….. Without radio or television, or the interruption of a ringing telephone, I can remember sitting in a room with sewing to be done or a book to be read, and enjoying the agreeable feeling of repair to body and soul…..”
[Betty Pavlige, Growing Up in Soulard, Knight Publishing Co., 1980, pp. 40, 85]
St. Louis newspaperman George Londa remembered his boyhood:
“When I was a youngster growing up in Newark, N.J., books were an important part of my life. In those days we were lucky; there was no television…. So we read dime novels…. Then we discovered the public library…. …it was about three miles to the library and we made that walk often for a number of years…. All of us read quite a bit….”
[George Londa, “In Olden Days, They Read”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec. 11, 1980, p. 4G ]
The dean of women students at Washington University in St. Louis recalled childhood days when her mother read aloud to her:
“I like to remember a lovely thing Mother did for me one day when I had mumps… That afternoon she sat down by my bed…and started reading aloud. She had made the trip to St. Louis, a full hour on the streetcar, to buy the book. The title? Barriers Burned Away by E.P. Roe, and it was chiefly about the great fire in Chicago. Scarcely a classic, but very thrilling to an underprivileged child who had no movies or television.
“….I doted on ‘Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight’ and could say it all by heart at the age of 5. …Bedtime was reserved for fairy stories. …But best of all were the hot afternoons when Mother would lie down on the floor in front of the screened door and read aloud Hawthorne’s version of the Greek myths in Tanglewood Tales…..”
[Adele Starbird, “Memories of a Girl’s Reading”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 27, 1966 ]
Books published a hundred years ago offer many ideas for imaginative play, games, and activities for children. How many parents today would suspect that such books even exist? Because their authors understood childhood imagination, and precisely because those books are not new, bright, shiny, ironic, or cutting-edge, such books are kept hidden in the closed stacks areas of modern libraries (for some good examples, browse in the Dewey number 793). Still another example of the Leftist stratagem: Bury or hide what is old and sensible and lavish praise on what is new and revolutionary.
It is absurd to contend that children who grow up surrounded by screens will have the same capacity for imagination that those earlier generations had.
Screens have the same effect that Orwell (in his 1946 essay on politics and the English language) ascribed to political language: They anesthetize the brain. It would be hard to imagine two things more antithetical than pictures flashing rapidly before a child’s eyes and the development of concept-formation in a child’s imagination. A child staring at a screen and another child reading a book with only a few illustrations are two very different creatures. But most grown-ups today cannot see the difference. Such is the power of modern propaganda and self-deception.
House pets can see pictures on a TV screen, but I doubt they could read a line of print. That is the difference between the animal brain and the child brain: The former restricted forever to perceptions; the latter capable—if taught and guided properly—of conceptualization, and then comprehension, and then thought. Do-gooders are forever claiming that new techno-gadgets will “make learning easy and fun.” And what do most parents do in response to that line? Swallow it whole. What they should do is take their children and run from such do-gooders.
How could children discover the magic in books with few or no illustrations when every time they look up, they see colorful screens dangled before them and people staring at screens? Imagination requires building pictures, but how can children do that when thousands of pre-fabricated pictures are foisted upon them from infancy onward? Nature equips them with the ability to build their own pictures. It does not equip them to absorb thousands of bright, flashy pictures imposed on them by other people in place of building their own.
As Ayn Rand wrote, concept-formation is not a “social activity.” It is not “inclusive.” It is not loud. It cannot be done amid noise, distractions, and flashing pictures. Libraries once offered a refuge from such places. Now they have become just another such place—and they want us to applaud them for it. I would sooner support a proposal for all tax-supported libraries to be disestablished.
Imagination lives wherever there are children uncorrupted by the tin gods of television and techno-gadgetry.
You cannot “get” imagination from libraries because they do not have it. Only individuals have it. Children have it. They are born with it; they carry it around with them, but it has no location in space or in any building. The modern anti-mind hates imagination because it cannot be mass-produced and marketed; because imagination may enable people to grow up seeing straight and thinking straight; because it may enable them to see that what the Revolution wants all of us to swallow is not nutritious but deadly poison.
Nine years ago, in “Why Do Children Play?”, Laura Wood wrote: “The world as it is elicits a response from a child.” [The Thinking Housewife, Oct. 13, 2010]
Quite right. Nothing astonishes children more than the fact of being alive. That capacity for astonishment, wonder, and curiosity should be protected most zealously by parents against the Modernist Zeitgeist, whose goal is to iron those things out of children so that they may be made into mindless, obedient ciphers in the Socialist New World Order. Children are not born with an incapacity to appreciate life and the world around them; they must be taught to become bored, stupid, unobservant, and receptive to lies.
Imagination is a means by which they try to make sense of the world—and are able to do so if they are not pressured, pushed, cajoled, bribed, threatened, punished, or flooded with screens and picture books. The pace varies from child to child. The proper response to that on the part of grown-ups is: Leave them alone.
One of the greatest imbecilities in the world today is people who think they are going to speed that up or improve it with hundreds of picture books and flashing screens. Children living in poverty in the 1930s had it better by far with access only to books with few or no illustrations. Their lives were rich with the very things children require to develop imagination: Parents reading aloud to them; parents playing with them; parents telling them stories of their own childhood; storytelling on radio—sounds that enlivened imagination, not suffocated it; and hours and hours of quiet, solitary play, and improvised games.
“In the 1940s we learned more from listening to ‘The Lone Ranger’ [on radio] and providing our own scenery than anyone can from ‘Sesame Street’ [on television],” wrote Dr. Lyman Page. [“TV Doesn’t Teach”, Letter to the Editor, New York Times, April 16, 1998 ] (Emphasis added)
“Providing our own scenery” is the job of imagination.
When actress Greer Garson was growing up in London, she was often confined to bed with various ailments. Her biographer wrote:
“From her insular existence sprang a remarkable imagination….. Grandfather Garson read constantly to the bedridden little girl. ‘I lived the characters in every book he read,’ she recalled. ‘When I was first on the stage, I could memorize pages of dialogue quite effortlessly and veteran actors would ask me, “Where did you learn that sense of timing?” I often felt like telling them, “By talking to myself,” but feared I might be misunderstood…..”
[Michael Troyan, A Rose for Mrs. Miniver: The Life of Greer Garson, Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1999, pp. 11-12]
How did she “live the characters”? In imagination.
How did she “talk to herself”? Through the interior voice in imagination.
When Shirley Temple sings to her dolls in Poor Little Rich Girl (1936), it is the magic of her imagination that makes them come to life.
In Miracle on 34th Street (1947), Edmund Gwenn says to young Natalie Wood, “Imagi-nation is a country.”
Indeed it was, and it still could be. It was a country children visited whenever they made up stories, made up games, read stories, or listened to grown-ups reading stories, books, or poems. But it is a country that Americans allowed to be conquered and taken over by an army of techno-racketeers pushing pictures, gadgets, and screens. And modern libraries are part of that army.
Modern anti-culture is, as George Bernanos said, “a universal conspiracy against all interior life.“ [“A Conspiracy”, The Thinking Housewife, Aug. 8, 2017]. And the “mass communications” industry and mass-marketed techno-gadgets are its most powerful expression.
As Daniel Dombrowski wrote more than thirty years ago, “…The electronic media bring with them their own message: no silence, hence no reading or writing of any depth, hence no philosophical meditation…” [Daniel Dombrowski,“Schopenhauer on Noise”, ETC.: A Journal of General Semantics, Winter 1983, p. 434] Or as my mother would have worded it: Not a moment’s peace and quiet in which to think your own thoughts.
Sixty-five years ago, I was given hours and hours of time to play; unplanned hours, quiet hours. I played in my sandbox in our back yard. I made up an imaginary playmate and talked to him. I played cowboys and Indians with my cousins and my neighbor Sharon. We walked and wrestled and played tag and baseball and threw snowballs. I played “let’s pretend” games with my first-grade classmates Tony and Michael and Terri and her sisters. At church I was an altar boy. At home I built a pretend “altar” and played at being “priest”. At night, my mother rehearsed me on lists of words I was assigned to learn and be able to spell and define. We played card games or board games or Scrabble. I liked Scrabble best of all.
Television was there but it was used selectively; it did not dominate our lives. Neither my father nor my maternal grandfather was overly impressed by television. They preferred newspapers and radio.
By contrast, children today face a menace even their parents fail to recognize. Everywhere they look, they see screens: In homes, schools, libraries, medical offices, dental offices, stores, and restaurants—and people staring at screens wherever they stand, sit, or walk. And they are taught by virtually everyone that it is good for them to look at screens. How could they suspect that all those grown-ups are wrong? How could they suspect they are living in a nightmare world?
To raise children properly is a sacred responsibility. It requires taking them seriously and leaving them alone for long periods to engage in imaginative play, which is the serious—not frivolous—business of childhood. But modern grown-ups are perpetual adolescents, and adolescents cannot take anything seriously. Taking their cues from self-serving “experts”, teachers’ unions, book publishers, library associations, and techno-racketeers, adolescent-witted parents imagine it is wholly innocuous and beneficial to children when they shower gadgets, screens, and picture books down upon them. That is what all those groups want us to believe—and it is a Big Lie.
Historians of a future age will marvel at entire generations of American parents who did such things to their children—in the name of doing good, of course. What was the matter with such people?, they will wonder. How could such people have been so gullible?
They will marvel at how generations of doers permitted their children and grandchildren to become a nation of spectators, not doing anything to oppose it but watching TV screens from their comfy chairs as their nation was invaded, their history rewritten, their language corrupted, their heroes and heritage denounced, their standards lowered, their holidays erased, their monuments torn down, their schools, cities, and streets renamed, and their sovereignty surrendered. And there is nothing in this list that modern libraries do not celebrate or approve, because those who run such libraries are firmly on board the Leftist bandwagon. “One step back, two steps forward…..” Keep that principle in mind the next time you walk into a library.
