My new favourite place

Prepare yourself for the nerdiest confession in the (i hate this word) blogosphere: I love this building: the British Library.

Today was my first visit to this incredible institution, with its 13 million books, hundreds of thousands of periodicals (3 million added annually), its art exhibitions,
its multitude of beautiful reading rooms with spacious desks and friendly librarians. Not only that, but they actually serve a very proper coffee in the cafe. I've never felt this way about a library. I'm so enamoured that i've posted a link to it so you can visit too. I now possess a readers card and can go whenever I like. And i anticipate going often.



This new found love may in part be due to a sense of gratitude instilled in me this morning by Doris Lessing, whose acceptance speech for the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature was published in this weekend's Guardian, and which I got around to this morning. She writes of villagers in Zimbabwe, who crave books to read, because they have none. So precious is there education that it often comes down to alphabetic lines drawn in the sand. She tells us of a young Zimbabwean mother waiting for drinking water for her children, lost in the pages of Anna Karenina that have been stuck on the counter of a remote India store. She talks of the hope that only one page of great literature might bring to those without much else in the world. And she writes of us, alluding to the library along the way:

We are a jaded lot, we in our world - our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words or ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency. We have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. If is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come upon it. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.

As the young girl walks home, "held upright by thoughts of the water she would give her children once home," Lessing asks us this: "That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is - we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?" Are we?
I found this a very moving piece of writing - certainly not a typical phenomena at breakfast.

I went to the libary inspired, hungry to learn, impressed and impressionable. Thanks, Mrs. Lesssing. Thanks, British Library...see you tomorrow.
The library at night.