By Andrew Field
Royal Oak Public Library

1.

Yesterday I heard a noise I immediately identified as a library noise – the sound of a cart rolling. And though it sounds insignificant, the particular sound felt almost Proustian in its associational richness, in the fecundity of its everydayness. For carts, as we know, are what we use to transport books, to get them where they need to be; and they are used all the time in libraries, and located in various places in the library: in storage rooms, basements, second floors and hallways, stationary, alone, empty and filled with books, pushed by pages, clerks, librarians, and managers, and fated with different configurations of wheels that squeak in certain ways or roll steadily or crookedly on the particular floor or carpet. You would think, then, that carts are conspicuous aspects of libraries, and, in a sense, they are. But in another sense, they are so interwoven into the fabric of the everyday at the library, that we do not see them. Even when we use them, unless they are broken, they are transparent to us. And so this sound, when I heard it, meant something; it seemed to emerge out of a texture I couldn’t see, and illustrate something about that texture. In so doing, I felt I was intuiting something about the nature of libraries, about the feel of the world of libraries, and therefore in some sense the world itself. And it left me wondering, what did that experience mean?

Although this moment might seem odd, rare, or trivial, it illustrates something I find to be true about libraries more generally, and that is that their meaning resides in the everyday, which often goes unseen. The everyday, like the sound of the cart, goes unseen because it is so familiar. This is a dynamic that has been commented on by philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as literary theorists like Gary Saul Morson. Heidegger writes, “because this average everydayness makes up what is optically proximal for [human beings], it has again and again been passed over.…” (Heidegger, 69). The everyday is so close to us, that we pass over it, we are unable to see it. Similarly, Morson writes, “If Tolstoy is considered the supreme example of realism, then the realist novel suggests that the most important events in life are not the grand, dramatic, and striking ones. They are, instead, the prosaic, undramatic, and ordinary ones we often do not so much as notice. Those events include the “tiny alterations” of consciousness, the infinitesimally small and vanishingly brief mental gestures making us who we are.” (Morson, 3) Morson then quotes Wittgenstein, who writes, “The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes)…And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.” It is hard to capture the everydayness of the library because it is always “before one’s eyes.” This is why hearing the sound of the cart was so surprising — I heard it so much that it had become in some sense invisible, unhearable. To hear it was to sense a kind of secret life, a life that represented the library world.

What is the library world? For we are not speaking of a chaotic, anarchic assemblage of random details, like bits of matter zipping around by chance. We are speaking of a world with integrity, in which these details cohere; and, to see the details, to see the everyday, we need to get a sense of the world in which these details, this everyday, occurs. Hubert Dreyfus gives us four definitions of world, three of which are relevant to this essay:

1. World can be used to mean a universe, conceived of as a totality of objects of a certain kind. For example, the physical universe as the set of all physical objects, or a universe of discourse, such as mathematics, as the realm of all objects studied by mathematics.
2. [omitted for the purposes of this discussion]
3. What Kuhn calls a ‘disciplinary matrix’ – ‘the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community’ – would be a world in this sense. […] It helps here to contrast the physical world (sense number 1) — as a set of objects – with the world of physics — a constellation of equipment, practices, and concerns in which physicists dwell.
4. The worldliness of the world. This is the way of being common to our most general system of equipment and practices and to any of its subregions. (Dreyfus, 89-91)

The first sense of world is on the sets of objects that compose the world, be they physical or mental. The second two senses of the world have to do with the social aspects of the world: the beliefs, values, and practices shared by a community. In the third sense, we are confronted with the notion that there are different worlds, like the world of physics, the business world, the fashion world, the academic world, the theater world, the library world. And the fourth sense is the backdrop of those worlds, the worldliness of the world. In this sense, we can speak of the library world, in the sense of number 3, as a “constellation of equipment [printers, computers, OPACs, etc.], practices [reading, studying, borrowing, browsing, planning, ordering, weeding, etc.], and concerns [lifelong learning, intellectual freedom, childhood literacy, etc.] in which [patrons and library workers] dwell.” This world takes place against the backdrop of the world, which is structured, as Dreyfus glosses Heidgger, by involvement, and the interdependence of human being and world. Our world is the sum of our involvement. By involvement, Dreyfus means that we care about others, ourselves, and the world — our being is characterized by concern, and the nature of this concern gives us a certain kind of world. To put it another way from a different angle, “our basic relationship with the world is one of disclosure, rather than cognition.” (Blattner, 132)

What is disclosed? When people walk into libraries, they are moving from a space into a place. The library is structured to do this, for this to happen. When I walk up the walkway leading to my library, I am aware that I am moving into a different place. A library is phenomenologically different than a grocery store, a bank, a clothing retailer, a restaurant, a community center. How is it different? There are a different set of expectations, for one. Libraries still tend to be somewhat quiet places after story time, and this suggests that even today, when many libraries focus on outreach and community, there is still something almost monastery-like about the library sometimes, both in the public eye and in the experience of its patrons and library workers. It is a place to study, to explore, to learn, to prioritize certain forms of attention over others. We are not selling anything. Browsing a shelf of books is different from browsing a shelf of condiments, because I think more of ourselves are invested into the process. It can be meditative and exciting. You slow down, letting your natural interests light up things that can pull you in more deeply. To browse is, in a way, to become a kind of indoor flaneur; it is a focused form of reverie, where you allow informed chance to influence what you see and how you see it. To browse is to be expectant; it is to anticipate, not shock, but surprise. It is a particular way of being involved with the world.

Browsing books at a library is a practice that occurs in a particular way in the library world, and in some sense helps to compose that world, since our involvement, as Heidegger argues, is how the world is structured. Yet too often studies of libraries take for granted the notion of the world. Their lenses are epistemological and cognitive, rather than ontological or phenomenological, and we rarely have a sense of how the experience of the library is made intelligible by its status as a world. A look at virtually any of the titles of articles in the latest library journals — “How Academic Libraries Support Systematic Reviews and Evidence Syntheses,” “Open Access and Citation Impact: Modality, Funding, Publisher, and Disciplinary Trends at the University of Kentucky” — all take for granted how the intelligibility of the library happens, through an involvement with a particular world. There is a deeper sense of belonging that libraries can provide, which does not find adequate expression through more cursory descriptions of engagement. As human beings we want to know, at a basic level, where we are and what we are doing. But when we occlude the world, and what the world means, we are living in a way that does not acknowledge the nature of our form of life.

The everyday that happens in the context of the library world is, I think, a quasi-religious phenomenon. By quasi-religious phenomenon, I do not mean to invoke God. What I mean is that the everyday involves a kind of unspoken structured ritual through which we approach and make meaning in an ongoing process of discovery and creation. Step into any library, and there is a quiet dance happening, between people studying, people learning, people browsing, people asking a question. Our background practices are rituals, or at least lend themselves well to ritual. We are ontologically wired for ritual, but it is not ritual in the sense of instantiating a division between the sacred and the secular. For the everyday is sacred, because it is the texture in which the majority of our lives take place. When we speak of the everyday, we are speaking of something that binds us. The root of “religion” means to be bound. The everyday at the library is a process that binds us to people, and in so doing binds us to real and imagined communities. This is how communities are formed. As a librarian, I play a role in this community, a community with values, practices, techniques, and forms of life, and in playing this role I find freedom, in the Kantian sense of a positive freedom that comes from doing my duty. But none of this is ever talked about often enough in the library literature, and this is a lacuna. The library world makes sense, is intelligible, because it is a world. This can alert us to both the fragility and the integrity of the library world, and therefore the need for care and concern in keeping its integrity intact. It is the everyday through which we can access the meaning, the significances, of the library world, and not exactly epistemological or cognitive theories. That’s what the sound of the cart alerted me to.

2.

I live with schizoaffective disorder. And this is a disease that we could say erodes the everyday. But in the same way in which the library world is often not talked about, there is even less about the relationship between schizophrenia-spectrum illnesses and librarianship. This is also a lacuna, but one that can be addressed as well through the lens of the everyday. The everyday is eroded, because when people become sick with mania, delusions, ideas of reference, alogia, hallucinations, etc., one of the first things that goes out the window is the texture of everyday life, the rhythms of it. Our very being changes. And so the world changes, and our ability to be involved with it changes. This is illustrated in an essay by the scholar Louis Sass, “Heidegger, Schizophrenia and the Ontological Difference.” Sass argues that it can be helpful to think of some aspects of the symptomatology of schizophrenia as involving a difference in ontology, a difference in being. This difference in being is not, to use another Heideggerian term, “ontic,” meaning it does not have to do with the furniture of the world, say, (sense number one of Dreyfus’s “world” above) but rather with our sense of the world itself, how we see the furniture (sense number three and four of Dreyfus’s “world” above). Another way of saying this is that, when I was sick, the everyday world went away. When the everyday world went away, the world as a form of involvement also dissolved. The world became opaque, and my involvement became solipsistic. And this severely affected my sense of belonging, and more generally my sense of my place in the world.

We don’t talk enough about how libraries allow us to experience a kind of place in the world, a sense of belonging. For it is the everyday aspects of the library that we enter into and involve ourselves with, and this everyday life is something we should not take for granted. By everyday I do not mean exactly just searching the catalog, picking up a hold, asking a reference question, using a study room, ordering books, planning programs, answering reference questions, etc., but the entire texture of significances, the library world, the referential whole, that these actions are a part of, which constitute the library world. It is the quasi-religious phenomenon spoken of above. It is an open world and an ordered world, with its own rituals, such as borrowing, browsing, studying, reading, learning. I see these rituals, and appreciate them, in part because there have been times when I did not have the benefit of any aspects of an everyday life, when everything became unfamiliar, where I lost the ritualistic flavor of the world. There is a library world, an academic world, a business world, but there is also a psychotic world, and in that world the everyday is abolished. In a sense, the rules change.

I think libraries are in excellent positions to help people feel a sense of belonging, even if it is brief, or quiet. They are at the intersection of the private and public in fascinating ways. But most studies on libraries never address this. They do not look at libraries as places for dwelling, places and sites of care, concern, and involvement. They do not study the world of the library in an ontological and phenomenological sense, and therefore cannot account for what Matthew Ratcliffe has called “existential feelings,” which are our feelings not about a person, or a thing, but our general sense of the world and our place in it, and the relative amount of belonging and estrangement we feel in the world.

Libraries are places where we can dwell in the world. They are places where our existential feelings are engaged. I think, oftentimes, people living with schizophrenia-spectrum illnesses don’t have the rituals built into their lives to help build a dwelling. They don’t have the opportunity to. They might be homeless, they might be struggling with auditory hallucinations or delusions of reference, they might have poverty of thought, they might experience mania and depression. All of these experiences erode our ability to build dwellings in the world. I remember, when I left the hospital about four years ago, I had to relearn how to make eye contact with other human beings. It sounds ridiculous to say this, because so obvious, but making eye contact is an important way we dwell in the world, a way we can try and gauge if we are being understood, and if we are understanding another. I mention this, because I had to relearn so much. It’s been four years, and I am still trying to find ways to build a dwelling in the world.

A library is a dwelling, where we encounter the rhythms of a particular everyday world. Libraries are sites of meaning. They are places we can go to find community, even if that community just means different kinds of parallel play. When I heard the sound of the cart, what I intuited is that the everyday world is all around us, but we do not see it or appreciate it because it is so familiar. But it is what our lives are largely composed of, and there therefore seems something tragic and misguided in not honoring this. Living with schizoaffective disorder, I think I have learned a greater appreciation of the everyday, because I have lived for different periods of my life in states of extreme unfamiliarity. Yet in my role as a librarian, I feel both a sense of freedom and a sense of belonging. This is because the everyday life of the library allows me to enter into it, to participate in it, to care about it and show concern for it. It is the rhythm of the everyday that shapes our being, and this is why studies of libraries deserve and demand a greater ontological and phenomenological orientation. There should also be more ethnographic and autoenthnographic studies about librarianship and mental illness. I can experience the everyday at the library because it is part of a world; and our being is not set against this world but rather, to use the Heideggerian term, “being-in-the-world.” There should be more studies that light up this phenomenon. Our experience is made intelligible because it is part of a world. Because the library world is a world, we can participate deeply with the life inside it, like the sound of the cart, and this can then change our life.

Works Cited

Blattner, William D. Heidegger’s Being and Time: A Reader’s Guide. Continuum, 2006.

Dreyfus, Hubert L. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. MIT Press, 1991.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, HarperPerennial/Modern Thought, 2008.

Morson, Gary Saul. Prosaics and Other Provocations: Empathy, Open Time, and the Novel. Academic Studies Press, 2013.

Ratcliffe, Matthew. Existential Feelings: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford University Press, 2008.

Sass, Louis A. “Heidegger, Schizophrenia and the Ontological Difference.” Philosophical Psychology, vol. 5, no. 2, 1992, pp. 109-132.