I went to Berkeley High, which was in the 1940's already a school of over 3000. In the Bobby sox Regiments of the time, where peer group pressure demanded a crushing conformity of dress, speech, and behavior, being an intellectual, especially an intellectual girl, was a hard, humiliating task. You lived in disguise. You hid your brain in the closet. You tried your damndest to put your heart into squealing for Frankie Sinatra. You bought skirts and sweaters just like the BWOC wore. But you never fooled anybody. It was like going to Finland and pretending to be Finnish without being able to speak Finnish. It was hopeless. It was six hours a day of social failure and internal exile for three years. The one thing that redeemed it for me was the Berkeley Public Library, right around the corner.
I went there as soon as school was out and stayed an hour or two or three, roaming the stacks. I was home. Home free. Free at last, Lord, free at last! I say that in all seriousness. That library was my liberty. There I restored and regained all the soul I compromised or lost at school. The librarians soon knew me, knew my type, and never bothered me. I investigated all the departments and all the floors. When I found French literature up on the dark third floor where nobody else ever came, I more or less moved in there. There was a window with an inner ledge where I could sit and read -- plowing very slowly with my third-year French through Cyrano de Bergerac and weeping aloud at the end, or lost to the world in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, or wallowing with earnest adolescent ecstasy in the poems of Ernest Dowson. The librarians in those days couldn't let people with a high school library card check out sexy bestsellers such as Forever Amber, but if there was a copy on the New Books shelf, they never knew if you took it up to the third floor, palpitated or yawned through it for hours, and then put it back.
Or maybe they did know?
Whatever they knew or didn't, I bless their memory, and that of the beautiful building full of books, and my third-floor window-niche. And, though American society of the 1940's was in many ways anti-intellectual, benighted, and rigidly oppressive, yet let me say this for it: The Public Libraries then were a public trust, a community responsibility. They were open every afternoon, six days a week, every week of the year, offering everybody liberty, learning, and the chance to make your soul.
With all good wishes,
Ursula K. Le Guin
Portland, Oregon
http://www.ursulakleguin.com/UKL_info.html
Photo Copyright © by Marian Wood Kolisch
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