Ambivalence and Opinion

Taking a cue from the Boris’s Cat Book of Coping, today has been productive in small and soft ways. Laundry provided me with a good, although not rigorous, cardio workout, as well as a closet filled with clean clothes. (Everything fit in the hanging shelves and on the hangers, btw. I was surprised, and very happy that I can still maintain a certain amount of control over my wardrobe.)

The math that I just did on my phone is not so soft and not really all that small, either, so I am content that tomorrow will be a day of errands and bus rides and something like expedition. I’m off to get a new phone number! I’ve not lived in Nebraska for more than a year, so maybe it’s time to act like I’m committed to not living there. Maybe.

Matthew Battles challenges me to face the ambivalence I feel when faced the constant struggle we humans undertake to make impermanent things permanent. I’ve read his book about the history of Library before and am no less pleased this time through. He has a sense of the smallness of people in the vast arrangements of books and shelves and ideals that have defined Library to various people engaged in various forms of being a Librarian over the millennia. His style is easy and engaging and I, of course, love the bibliographies and notes he provides. Yes. I am a complete bibliography nut. It is where and when he talks of antiquity and the libraries that were built as destroyed that I get all emotionally involved.

Books are beautiful and they fall apart. They age and die and suffer injury as any other living or actual thing. Even granite is not eternal. I am often bemused at attempts to preserve that which may very well be in the damn way. At the same time, there are always those people who would just as soon nothing had come before them, not simply the incredibly powerful or persuasive, but the paranoid and simple-minded as well. Bombing libraries and blowing up statues and burning books and scholars: these are nothing more than the cruel attempts of the small to make themselves seem large.

It is a simple and pithy generalization. And it is an old one. It is as old as curses on scrolls against any who would do damage or commit theft. It is as old as uncouth jokes about marriage; as people in love believing that no one has ever felt that way before; as politicians spinning every syllable to achieve their desired ends. It is not as old as death, and that is where it becomes important to remember that we humans live very short lives. We do not have the gift of awareness of the experiences of every atom in our bodies, even though the science suggests that every atom in our bodies predates us by vastly long periods of time.

We are simply one of nature’s recycling mechanisms.

And yet. We can create artifacts of immeasurable beauty and power – and we can know that they are immeasurable because we cannot conceive of the way to invent the measure of them. We do this time and again – for tens of thousands of years we have left ourselves evidence of our own existences, our own abilities. Our ancestors created and our ancestors destroyed. It would be very precious to believe that there are any of us alive who are not descended from at least a few of both.

There are times, moments on the timelines where some other force stepped in, some force not made of human DNA, and altered the expected course of things. Vesuvius blew up and rained ash over Pompeii and Herculaneum. The destruction of life and the preservation of artifacts in one go. Were it not for the volcano, what could we know of these cities, of the people who lived there, of their architecture and habits and even of their reading materials?

People occupied cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde and then disappeared, the dwellings remain, their midden heaps remain, but what do we know of the people? That they climbed to the top of the mesas to gather food, that they were smaller in stature than people of the 20^th century, that they built kivas? I have listened to lectures from people exercising every ounce of caution and meticulous research to back up an act of sheer intellectual imagination to explain anything concrete and plausible about the people who would have lived there.

We do not have to make such leaps at Pompeii – many of our questions are different there – they are about how connected one city was to another; what trade routes may have looked like; what sorts of paints or glasses or ceramics were used. Nothing particularly astonishing, and yet it is all very connected to us because we can look around and see how we live that echoes something like a pan-human experience (if such a thing is even a responsible thought).

So what happens when the repositories of our current collection of human evidences come under attack from bombs or fires or floods or earthquakes or careless management or politically based rhetoric? Do we understand the importance of maintaining connection to the stories of our pasts, our arguments, our failures and our successes? Or do we chalk it up to the life cycle?

This is where my ambivalence ends.

Any attempt to narrow the definition of human existence to one point of view or one educational ethic or one philosophical bent or one theocratic ideal is an act of dehumanization. When the right to be challenged is denied, the right to solve problems is damaged. When learning is quantified, the ability to learn is compromised. When access to the stories of creation – all of the stories of every creation that we can catalog and share – is limited because of any authoritative human philosophy, the human experience is fundamentally altered to that of a termite wearing blinders.

The paradox of a volcano destroying a city and preserving a library is not particularly compelling to me. The story of the monk who used a silk thread to begin to separate the layers of scrolls one from another in order to provide reading material for those who came after him is.

Blessings, beloveds.