Reading leads us toward questions and ambiguities. Part of living in a democracy is to be challenged, and to respond, and to live up to our responsibility to learn from what we feel. If we wish to be citizens, that courage is what our destiny requires; we also will want to live up to it.
In a democracy, the library is centered on the citizen. To explain this, I always begin with the idea that the library is a process or a relationship that people enter when they are challenged by events or knowledge. It contains more than books, of course, and it may not even be about books. The centered librarian takes an active stance toward the complex flow of information, and the uncovering of the user's aspirations. When change happens in the world — in the evolving environment, the economic jungle, the political sphere — it will be in evidence at the library, supported with relevant resources nearby, not far from a space to talk. And that is where the librarian works, at the talking place that is the center of the library.
To assist in the construction of thoughtful lives, libraries and librarians need to sponsor continuing public conversations — about our institutions and values, cultural change, literature and cinema, other nations, and the reach of the social sciences worldwide — devoted to building critical awareness of the continuing evolution of the world. When a library invites its readers to read, and then to bring original experiences and questions to each other, it recognizes the truths that we are never finished becoming, and that we need to speak to each other. This invitation is also an expression of respect and anticipation. A library that invites its people — centering on them in this way — has begun to create lifelines, ways to rescue and inspire literacy, identity and confluence.
If libraries are instruments of change, nonjudgmental places where people go to revise their thinking, and to alter their ideas of themselves, we need to see the reader at the center, and the center of the reader as the purpose of every interaction between librarian and user. If we believe that libraries help us to fully realize a democratic identity, then librarianship needs to rethink its instrumentality in our culture. In a democracy, it seems to me, going to a library is a way of engaging in what Maxine Greene calls "the dialectic of freedom,"note 1 the way we have of speaking about our national idea and its meanings to us.
A public library offers a person ways of discovering, thinking and acting on the possible. It offers a person ways toward self-definition. Conducted with care, and centered on the reader, a library's process addresses aspirations and assists them to break through conventional thought and practice, into new ways of becoming. This is the purpose and promise of cultural institutions: to break through meaningless and shallow parts of our culture, so that we might rescue ourselves in times of emptiness, and to live forward, with human possibility defining our own horizon.
For each person, I think, a library confirms what one's life is meant to be and is still capable of becoming. The world, even our small individual worlds, is in dense motion — we float like specks within its flow — and we no longer are free to select the knowledge that comes to us, though much of it may be unwanted. More than ever before, to be a reader and a learner is in itself a challenge. Entertainment steals our attention. Cost and time stand large among the obstacles to centered reading. As a result of rapid change, we are likely to feel a sense of isolation, and a struggle to hold on to our certainties. We may experience an absence of resources, a need for books and computers, and the need for a trusted person as our guide. We will need these things for our entire lives. It is certain that we need to see other learners as well, to learn from them, as we always have done, but also to be confirmed by them. Conceiving of oneself as a reader and thinker is perhaps the central part of what a reader-centered librarian can teach a citizen.
We need to be addressed as adults and as learners, and assumed capable of exploring ideas and sharing experiences. We need a place where encouragement is assured for us. The library, centered on the reader, will offer a progressive frame where citizens can interpret and experience what matters to them, reflecting on the past and implicating the future. The fabric of the world is increasingly imminent, adults know, continuously generating new, difficult knowledge; but this is why libraries and librarians exist. Reading and talking about reading confers the capacity to imagine the possible. Once we have introduced promising ideas and ways to talk about them, we have revised the library's relationship with its citizens. I believe this is how progressive discourse and expression can enter our common lexicon.
Reading is thinking, reading is knowing, and the library remains the place where thought, literacy, and knowledge are mutually constructed in individual lives. When we do this we learn that readers read not to escape their experiences and their lives, but to discover and restore themselves, to recollect where they came from and where they are. From there, they may step forward, outward, toward whatever they wish to be next. Reading is something that only our own minds can do: it is always a first-person experience. When we enter it and talk about it, each book is a moral universe, living and breathing between us, reader and book. No one else can do it for us, because there are parts of us, deep inside, that only narratives and myths will stir. We need this because we are all unfinished; each of us is disordered in a different way, but all of us are works in progress, never more so than when we read and speak together, the librarian, the reader and the reading at the center of our long conversation.
David Carr taught librarianship for three decades after a career as a teacher and librarian. He writes, lectures, and consults in museums and libraries, emphasizing adult experiences, and the passion for reading in adult life. His essays have been collected in The Promise of Cultural Institutions and A Place Not a Place. His new book, Open Conversations, will appear in 2011, published by Libraries Unlimited.