close the door behind me, and the noise of the street fades. The harsh light of noon is replaced by the soft glow of the shaded lamps hanging from the ceiling, and I step gently across the hall on thick carpets. In the high archway that opens into the great inner room, I stop.
And, oh my soul! What thoughts overwhelm me! The library. The place of books. The hall of souls. A congregation, a city, a magnificent testament to the gifts of language, of reason, of thought.
The tables, the stands, the very shelves declare their reverence for this well of words. (No brusque metallic bookends, no clanging metal shelves, no plastic honeycombing over buzzing flourescent tubes in acoustic tile ceilings.) Dark wood, shined by use, green shades over the tables, rich tapestried carpeting in every aisle and ornate carving on the wainscoting all feed the eye and delight the heart.
But the books. The books! Their bodies are lovely; smooth leather coverings, darker in the middle of the spines from hands that held them lovingly; faded gold lettering and gilded page edges, worn or occasionally dog-eared. The air is heavy, rich, aromatic with the scent of the old volumes. The smell is a faded, yellow-brownish with undertones of hand-rubbed leather and a hint of the old wood; a note of pipe tobacco blends it all together.
And best of all -- the letters, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters; Oh! the stanzas, cantos, essays, sermons, eulogies, speeches, and elegies all contained here! Hugely magnificent ideas, low and humble thoughts, preserved, terrible and beautiful and ironic and sublime and common -- resting, like mortal bodies in their graves, waiting their resurrection day, and being raised again and again to delight and terrify and save.
A wood, a grove, of poets over their in that corner. Homer, with his hard, noonday light and his barbaric eloquence and the heroes pursuing glory and a way home (they know not why). Virgil and Tennyson and a softer light, still heroic and duty-bound by fate that demands right behavior in a world that has a purpose after all. Ovid and Dante and pictures of things higher than most minds can be carried without falling like Icarus. Milton, Tasso, Aristo, and Browning and all of them still singing their songs and chanting their words when the pages open.
But here are the historians! Herodotus, like Homer, eyes open everywhere he goes, seeing the pictures that make life, and telling stories for the sheer delight of it. Thucydides (like Virgil) with a purpose, and men discovering the extent of their own evil and still believing, finally foolishly, that there is a glory in the city made in their own image. And Tacitus and Livy (Oh! the Empire!) and a little farther on, Macaulay and even Carlyle (and the Empire wasn't enough).
I rub my eyes. Philosophers and scientists and monarchs and explorers and aristocrats and civil servants and geographers and teachers. In every book on every shelf, something to learn. All of them mistaken at least in part, many of them grievously. Some of them so beautiful they cannot be forgotten, some so abstruse they cannot be remembered.
And yet, as I stand, undecided, unable to make the first choice (so final-feeling, an elimination of everything else by choosing one), I know where the great riches are; I make my way through the hush and the deep aroma of time, and I find that aisle, and I find those shelves, and I run my fingers over their backs before beginning to pull them down to read their words. Here, Augustine. And here, Foxe and Colet. And here, Bunyan and Henry and over there, Spurgeon! Owen! Brown! Rutherford! This library is not a mausoleum or museum or mortuary, it is a living thing and it transmits living things -- words -- and the words speak to me now as they did to others in the past. Indeed, many of the books standing here now represent the fruit of reading other books which stand next to them -- this is a garden, for it has reproduced and grown. But these books carry real life, because when the covers are gently turned back and the pages carefully opened, the words inside tell of living truth and genuine life and absolute beauty. These words are not God's words, but the results of God's words, and thus a thing nearly as much to be desired.
And as I turn the first age-stained pages of Bunyan, the rest of the library fades from consciousness, and "As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted upon a certain place . . ."
