by Mark Morelli
If I had three wishes, here's what they would be:
I would wish libraries would stop trying to make their facilities user-friendly. That is, I wish libraries would no longer try to be cool.
I would wish that churches would stop accommodating people, and give people
the unsung privilege of being servile for a change. (First step: Take electric guitars out of Protestant services and tambourines out of Catholic ones.)
They say you can't turn back the clock. Maybe not, but let me dream. What if we did return to the time when, as you darkened the doorway of a church or library, you entered another realm. Sanctuary. Your contribution to the common good of this sanctuary was to keep mum, respect the rules, and not forget about even dreaming that the rules can be bent for you. You were a little bit miserable because of it, and when did that ever hurt anyone?
Eating and drinking were off limits in libraries and churches. Kids didn't eat chocolate crackers in church. Juice boxes and Cheerios changed all that. There were not lemonade vendors strolling up and down church aisles, which I've heard happens in some of the big suburban Protestant churches.
So now, late 1999, Starbucks have set up shop inn two public library buildings in Stamford, CT and Portland, Oregon.
They think that introduces pleasure. It only eliminates it:
When I was in college, I tucked a large coffee in a Styrofoam cup in my book bag. Balanced it steadily, sweat dripping from my brow. I snuck it in. I had crossed the Berlin Wall!
(No kidding. The librarian in charge was Hildegard Schnutkin, an old schooler with a hacksaw accent whom, one could easily imagine, had four decades before informed on her parents to the S.S.)
But back to my story: Coffee never tasted better. Just as cigarette smoke, snuck behind a woodshed, never hit the bloodstream with more promise of delight.
For that matter, libraries should not make it inviting for boneheads who do not read to enter the premises.
They should not lend videos that are not documentaries, or at least PBS dramatizations of short stories. As a regular library patron, I think there-goes-the-neighborhood each time people pop into and out of libraries for videos and don't bother to glance at the newest books. Will bookshelves go the route of the parlor piano, pretty to look at but with no one left who
knows how to play it?
The recent religious trend is mega-churches. The Church at the End of the Mall circled by a honeycomb of support group rooms, filled every night of the week. Support groups make people feel good. But guilt, ahhh guilt, makes people do good.
People should alter their needs according to the church's demands. And people should just come into a library clean, quiet and see if they can manage without a steaming cup of overpriced coffee.
Institutions cannot remain institutions if they change. People should conform to the institutions that exist. Don't they know how wonderful it is, in this culture which changes quicker than names on "Baywatch" dressing rooms, to have sacred places that buck trends by not looking down their noses at trends?
In short, there should be at least two places in the world where people know to just shut up, and if not, be shushed or browbeaten into shameful silence. Will Shushing, like Latin and, as some fear, Yiddish, be a lamented dead language?
My third wish?
I wish none of this stuff bugged me.