Yes,
yesterday's post was set at the University of Oregon, but focused on the
Knight Library. Early in my college career, I thought people were going to the
"night" library, which I imagined to be a place for evening study. It
sounded reasonable enough, but I was mistaken.
As
stated in the previous post, people seemed to use the Knight Library more for
study space than for its contents, but there was not only the Knight Library. We
also had a Math and Science library. I know, because I worked at both of them.
It
was part of my financial aid package. Previously, with no financial aid
package, the only campus jobs I had been able to get were all in the dining
hall. I was grateful for those jobs, but the libraries were better. Both had
great supervisory staff, and I still remember them fondly, but the libraries were
easier, more interesting work.
The
Math Library was in Fenton Hall, and mainly notable for how very quiet it was.
I would find a few books to shelve on the average shift, and I might see
someone there once in a month of shifts, but that was it. If I was ever going
to be murdered during college, that would have been a good place to do it, but
the odds of someone thinking of looking for a victim there seemed low, because
that would involve knowing where it was.
The
Science Library, in Onyx Bridge Hall, was bigger, newer, and livelier. Those
materials were being used all the time. I know because there were always things
to shelve, and one of the things that we would do when other things were caught
up was check shelves to see if things were in order, and they never were.
There
were some books, but I would guess 90 percent of the materials were scientific
journals. There were fairly traditional things like The Lancet or The
Journal of the American Medical Association, but there were also fun things
like The Journal of Irreproducible Results and The Worm Runner's
Digest. If those last two don't sound familiar, I had not heard of them
before either, but just reading a letter correcting faulty reasoning in a
previous issue's article on conjoined twins in gummy bears, well, academic
journals don't need to be stuffy.
There
was never a lot of time to get caught up in anything, but there were always
ideas there. It was during this time that I got into Smithsonian and Psychology
Today magazines. It wasn't just the library -- that was helped by a Smithsonian
found on a train, and a Psychology Today cover in the campus bookstore
that looked interesting. However, it was at the Science Library that I saw the Smithsonian
with the cover of Vermeer's Girl with a pearl earring, and one of my
coworkers told me no matter who saw the painting they thought they girl looked
familiar but could not place her. Now we all just think she looks like Scarlett
Johannson.
(It
was an excellent article too. The description of View of Delft, and how
Proust referenced it in Remembrance of Things Past, was the first thing
to make me really start noticing portrayal of light in painting.)
Still,
there were three things that came to me in about a week's time that probably
made the biggest impression. Two were books that came through, one on a cart
and one at the desk.
The
first was Robert Bakker's The Dinosaur Heresies. Based on the
eye-catching headline I read the first part, that all of our ideas of the
duck-billed dinosaurs (hadrosaurs) were predicated on a damaged jawbone found
for the first specimen, and finding correct specimens did not change that. If
Bakker overreached on deciding that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, the ideas on
shallow seas patterns of extinction still seemed brilliant to me.
Then
on a book cart I found The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals:
From the Lost Ark to the New Zoo and Beyond by Karl Shuker, focusing on animals
discovered since 1901. I hadn't realized how new some species were. Obviously
they existed, but we didn't know about them.
The
third book was shown to me, which is why I don't remember the title. An older
gentleman showed me a passage that referred to finding archaeological evidence
of maize in India before Columbus visited the Americas, where it was commonly
believed to have been discovered. After finding this article, I'm pretty sure the
man was Carl L. Johannessen:
Anyway,
the way these worked together, coming so close together, was that I concluded
that science must be a constant process of learning that you were wrong. Because
of that, scientists should be remarkably humble people, though I'm not sure investigation
would bear that out.
Bakker
may have gotten some things wrong, but he changed the way people were thinking
so they could figure it out. Jared Diamond did an amazing job with Guns,
Germs and Steel, and he inspired many people with it. The word is that he
got some things wrong too, which is not terribly surprising considering how
many different disciplines he touched on, but the reason people can point to
mistakes is because he took a risk and got them thinking.
Actually,
I think one of the people Diamond inspired was Charles Mann, who wrote 1491,
and if you think that trying to correct entrenched wrong ideas is easy,
especially in anthropology, you need to read his book. You are wading into a
pit of vipers, but it's valuable, and inspirational.
All
of those things inspire me. There are so many incidents where I remember the
time and place of discovering a book so clearly, because it was an important
moment and the library made it happen. Libraries bring many books together, and
they bring the humans together with the books. Together there is the sharing of
knowledge, but it is not static. It can kindle other ideas, lead to new quests
for knowledge, and even change us as people.
That's
what I will try and drive home tomorrow.
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