Open Writing

My beloved's occasional solo forays Outside always incites me to fine-tune my cover of Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone," and her recent trip to Wyoming with our middle daughter, Leah, was no exception. Even though our late July weather belied it, my lonely heart resonated with "Ain't no sunshine when she's gone; it's not warm when she's away." Oh, Withers' lyric is simple enough, but confusion remains over how many times he sings "I know, I know, I know" during the refrain. Online lyric sites claim that he sings it twenty-four, twenty-five, or twenty-six times, but, after practicing it enough to drive anyone nearby bonkers, twenty-two "I knows" feels right to me.

A semi-domesticated guy, an emotionally needy cat, and a large dog with a thyroid condition holding down the fort for two weeks naturally leads to today's topic: "squalor," a relative of "squalid: dirty and wretched, as from poverty of lack of care," according to American Heritage Dictionary. Chez Hill seemed rather squalid a couple of days before Clare's scheduled return, even to this observer, who believes letting housekeeping duties accumulate prevents dealing with them too frequently. Fortunately, extended consideration of my sloth was diverted by descriptions of real squalor in the library's copy of Steven Johnson's book "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World."

A description of typical slum squalor in 1850 London begins on page eighteen: "The flat has two rooms … There is not one piece of good, solid furniture in the entire flat. Everything is broken, tattered and torn, finger-thick dust everywhere, and everything in the greatest disorder … When you enter the flat, your sight is dimmed by tobacco and coal smoke so that you grope around at first as if you were in a cave, until your eyes get used to the fumes and, as in a fog, you gradually notice a few objects. Everything is dirty, everything is covered with dust; it is dangerous to sit down." Living there were a mother and father, four children, and a very lazy maid. "Yet somehow these cramped, tattered quarters did not noticeably hinder the husband's productivity, though one can easily see why he developed such a fondness for the Reading Room at the British Museum. The husband, you see, was a thirty-something radical by the name of Karl Marx.

The British Museum's Reading Room was in fact the nation's library, which separated from the museum in 1973 and became the British Library. Once I encountered Marx's memory while visiting Manchester, England. I went to Chetham's Library, which claims to be "the oldest free public reference library in the United Kingdom." In other words, anyone can go there and read their books, but nobody can borrow them; in fact, Chetham's original books were literally chained into place. This free library was established in Manchester by the 1653 will of Humphrey Chetham, a wealthy cotton merchant and High Sheriff, who demanded that the librarians "require nothing of any man that cometh into the library."

Most of Chetham Library's 100,000 books predate 1850, which suited Marx, who met his pal Friedrich Engels there regularly about that time. Another English library, the Francis Trigge Chained Library of 1598, dubiously claims titled of Britain's oldest public library, but it shouldn't be confused with the John Trigg Library, the definitely unchained community library of Ester, which operates on the honor system. Esterites are holding the "5th Annual LiBerry Music Festical and Pie Throwdown" fundraiser for their library at the Golden Eagle in Ester on August 21, and all library, book, and pie lovers should attend.

Our borough's public libraries are far freer and much more popular than Chetham's and Trigge's. Nearly sixty percent of borough residents have active library cards they've used in the last two years, not counting the thousands who don't own cards frequent the library, and thousands of others whose cards have been inactive for more than two years. Our library is less squalid, and more inclusive of ideas than the old English libraries that provided only single points of view. But we all agree with Ralph Sockman, the leading Protestant minister in the mid-twentieth century, who said, "The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder."