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?

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