John Miedema

What do people see in libraries? What has sustained libraries right through the information age, now that there is web access in nearly every home? Could it be the books? There is no doubt that the web is better for some information needs — for searching, for reading snippets and shorter articles, for networking with other material and writers. Still, there seems to be an enduring conviction that books are better for some kinds of reading — longer and more challenging non-fiction, and pleasure reading of fiction and literature.

Good fiction has two qualities — something familiar and something unusual or surprising. Good non-fiction also has these qualities; scientific and philosophical expositions take us beyond our ordinary perceptions to someplace unexpected. The book lends itself to reading these materials. It has fewer distractions. I can take the book to a more suitable setting than a desk or laptop. The book feels right in my hand so I can go deeper into the content. Readers go to another place, a sort of second life, perhaps as entertaining as the virtual one. “The place I’ve entered is what John Gardner, in his classic book The Art of Fiction, calls the fictional dream. Because the writer has done her job, the world of the book I am reading has become, for the moment at least, more real than the world at my elbow.” Rebecca McClanahan, Word Painting.

Some cognitive theorists will tell you that you cannot really introspect mental events, that consciousness is really just a residue of unconscious mental processes. Others like John Lilly have documented the common experiences reported by people in conditions of meditation and sensory deprivation. It’s true that I cannot see my neurons firing, but introspection does seem to reveal another world, qualitative and symbolic. Like most experiences — inner or outer — we need the proper language as scaffolds for interpretation. I think fiction in particular provides that language.

The boundaries between real life and imagination are not as clear for children, so they tend to go back and forth more easily than adults. Do you remember the delight you had in stories as a child? When I was ten I revelled in Narnia and Watership Down. Must have read them over seven times a piece. Like many adults, I reached a point when I stopped reading fiction. It happened during my undergrad years when I had to read too much serious material. It was only when I started reading Harry Potter to my kids that I rediscovered fiction. They were too impatient to wait for the nightly reading so they took off with it on their own and have been reading voraciously ever since. So have I.

Fiction and imaginative non-fiction allow adults to be reborn. Especially when adult life is at its most dreary, we cultivate ideas about how life could be different. A dream, a hope, a desire. We have “stuff in the basement” (the king of second lives, Italian philosopher Rocky Balboa). Often it is floating just beneath the surface of consciousness, difficult to articulate. Or maybe we have a sense of it, but it may not be realistic to pursue, at least right now. Well, what if you could get your hands on a book that expressed that idea … and in so doing gave it life. Wouldn’t that be irresistible to read? A kind of bibliotherapy to help you fight another day? As said by the narrator in the closing lines of Stranger Than Fiction, things like fiction are not merely accessories to our lives, sometimes they are there to save our lives.

There was a time when librarians snubbed fiction as inferior reading. Even today, the databases and computer terminals tend to have preference. But the day may come when people no longer need libraries for computer access. The irony should not be lost that it may be the fiction shelves that sustain the mission of libraries into the future.

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