The Questioning Librarian

Yesterday marked the one hundredth anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an act which proved to be the spark that set off the First World War. Four years of pointless, mechanized slaughter followed, in which over 65 million people died. The history of our civilization is rife with useless wars that accomplished next to nothing, but the First World War must surely rank as one of the most pointless conflicts we've ever engaged in. Worse than that, the conflict continues to affect our world in ways both numerous and negative.  A crowd in London celebrate's Britain's declaration of war, 1914 Humanity seems to need little pretext to start to kill one another. We go to war over reasons both large and small, petty in both senses of the word. We battle each other over resources, territory, because our neighbors are a different ethnicity than us, because we quibble over the precise interpretation of a religious text, because we have a divine mand...

When I went to my book club last week, I was looking forward to discussing the Anita Shreve novel that had been selected, a book that was interestingly written even if the story itself was a little dull for me. The way our book club is set up is that each of us takes a turn talking about what we thought about the book and got out of it, and with the diversity of people there, ranging from a retired German teacher, an old Presbyterian minister, to a local artist, the discussion is always interesting. But what was most striking for me this time was the response to the book from a member of the group who spoke very little about the novel itself. Instead, he talked about how when he lived in California he walked several miles to the library to take out books, how he treasured them, how a handful of books that he had taken out of the library changed his life. It really turned out to be a profound mediation on the power of books to alter a life in the most surprising ways.  Where I ...

Some days, I find it hard to feel that humans are essentially good. Most people must experience this feeling, I think, especially if they work with the public. It is easy to slip into a permanent state of mind, wherein humans are only to be viewed through the lens of our worst qualities. Certainly there is enough fodder to fuel this; we are driven by greed, by malice and hatred towards our fellow human beings, both ones we know and ones we don't, people who are different from us. We destroy ancient forests for a few dollars, we kill each other over absolute pettiness, like whether or not the communion wafer literally becomes the body of Christ, or the fact that our skin is a different color. The litany of the crimes we've committed against each other is long and never ceases to grow. Our history as a civilization is littered with purges and pogroms, assassinations and Terrors, and that doesn't even begin to cover what we've done to other species, blithely sending thous...

A few days ago I read with some level of interest that the anti-gay American Family Association is asking its members to refuse to either use or accept mail with the new Harvey Milk stamps, honoring this country's first openly gay elected official. The abject pettiness of this should be obvious to anyone, but I find it strangely encouraging.  This incident seems to represent the current state of the anti-gay movement in this country; having been losing every major battle for the past two years, they are reduced to bickering over stamps. A hollowed-out movement, the organized, anti-gay bigots of this country, while still strong enough to, disturbingly, block important legislation like anti-bullying because it might just encourage people to be nice to gay students, are increasingly on the defensive. They are a movement that is loud and belligerent (the faux online encyclopedia "Conservapedia", for instance, refers to Milk as a sexual predator), protesting the rise of mar...

Why do I write? Why do I take the time to write things down that a handful of people will read...and in the case of my writing outside of this blog, at best one or two other people will read? Some days when the writing is hard, when the words just won't come and even a sentence is a struggle to piece together, it seems better just to give up and go read. But I always come back. So why do I do it? A few years ago I read a book about our need to tell stories, The Storytelling Animal  by Jonathan Gottschall. It was a fascinating read, other than a completely unwarranted and baseless attack on the Sherlock Holmes stories. To tell stories, in Gottshall's rendering, is to be human. It's what we do. Everything in our lives is based around telling stories. A little thought on our history is enough to support his thesis; from cave paintings and oral storytelling to Shakespeare, Wilde, and YouTube web series and social gatherings, our lives revolve around telling and hearing sto...

Last week National Geographic  released video from what is being hailed as the first simulation of the evolution of the universe. In what must have taken thousands of hours of work, this depiction of the universe shows the evolution of early galaxies, beginning a mere twelve million years after the big bang occurred. Take a look: One can hardly help but be moved by the sight of it, of seeing the universe unfold before our very eyes. No simulation is perfect, of course, but as a representation of the best science available at present it still carries with it a great majesty. Seeing the passage of such an immense length of time is humbling; it reminds us of the brevity of our own lives and puts the hubris of humanity firmly in its place. This is one of the joys of science, the ability that science has to convey wonder to us, from the evolution of the universe and the images from the Hubble Telescope to the sense of deep time that comes from looking at the rocks and fossils ...

I think I only just noticed on Friday that it was spring. Yes, there have been a few warm and sunny days this past month, more than welcome after the endless night of winter, but they seemed illusory, like it was too good to be true just yet. When I left the apartment that morning, there could be no doubt that the season had arrived. The scent of the air, the small warmth of the breeze, and the morning sunshine meant spring, for certain. I noticed how green the grass was, how without noticing it the trees had all started budding and blooming. My drive north to State College for a meeting was an endless panorama of mountains turned green, with brilliant dots of purple, scarlet and white revealing the blossoms of spring among them. I finally planted flowers today, turning a desolate patch of weed into a more attractive plot of ordered flowers, and while my back aches from the work, I always feel at home when I'm working with plants, rare though that may be anymore.  For over ten...