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An autumn reverie: Leaves, trees, books and libraries
J Clin Epidemiol Vol. 48, No. IO. pp. 1285-1287.
08!&4356(95)00002-X
1995
Copyright (2 1995ElsevierScienceLtd Printedin Great Britain. All rights reserved 0895-4356/95 $9.50 + 0.00
Second Thoughts AN AUTUMN
REVERIE: LEAVES, AND LIBRARIES
TREES,
BOOKS
RICHARD V. LEE* Department of Medicine, Children’s Hospital of Buffalo, 219 Bryant Street, Buffalo, NY 14222, U.S.A. (Received 30 November 1994)
Sunday 16th October 1994
the library are alive with the aura or discovery, I was driving from Dixville Notch to the sense of coming upon, opening up a new area. Manchester, New Hampshire, today. A brilliant Autumn is a muted season. The tree colors sunshining day, the White Mountains velvet are warm like the soft colors of leather bound in autumnal colors: russet, gold, orange, red books. Sunlight illuminates leaves like the lights deciduous leaves contrasting with the sober on a library table illuminate the pages of a book, green of pine and fir. The three-hour drive along transforming them into shimmering, iridescent Interstate 93 has vistas of the Ammonoosuc sheets. The scent is robust, redolent with cycles and Pemigawasset River Valleys, and the of living, the aroma of accumulating wisdom, curious rock formation of the “Old Man of the the smell of leather. The resulting murmur of Mountains” at Franconia Notch. It was a quiet conversation, pages turning, leaves talking serene, solitary drive through one of temperate in the wind and falling to the ground, are sounds nature’s most observed events. For no particuof respectful silence that fill the fall forest and larly obvious reason other than the ambience and my joyful response to it, I was struck by a the well-tended library. Autumn is the crucial connection with libraries and books and leaves season of temperate ecology, without it the midsections of the northern and southern hemiand trees. spheres would be infertile, unsuitable for agriFond memories of some of the great libraries of the world, for the libraries of my youth, and culture. Deciduous tree leaves fall and slowly for my own work space and library fed a reverie rot into humus, the fundamental fertilizer that on similarities, the affiliation of leaves and trees, makes topsoil. Libraries, derivatives of trees, are books and libraries. There is something com- fertile fields for learning and writing. Autumn fortable about autumn, like well worn shoes and and libraries are not graveyards or dead-end blue jeans, old friends, and libraries. After all, storage. Autumn and libraries symbolize and libraries are composed of a myriad of old contain beginnings, nourishment, and nurture. friends: books, ideas, people. The essence of a Perhaps it was the aura of latent fecundity, of library is similar to a Franconia Notch or a high fermentation, that shaped my woodsy, seasonal mountain pass: a well-defined space that opens library metaphor. The reading room at the Medical History upon vistas: intellectual, emotional, and sensory Library at the Yale School of Medicine is one comings in and goings out. In a library there is a clear order, geographic and mental, but a of these autumnal sites. It is a large space great sense of freedom as well. The confines of with high vaulted ceilings, with floor-to-ceiling shelves filed with Vesalius, Laennec, Rhazes, *All correspondence should be addressed to: Richard V. Sydenham, Osler, a plethora of scientists and Lee, M.D., Department of Medicine, Children’s Hospital of Buffalo, 219 Bryant Street, Buffalo, NY 14222, doctors. The leather bound chairs for reading U.S.A. and the oak work tables are sheathed by 1285
1286
Richard V. Lee
lights that create a discrete luminescent cubicle. I spent many hours there, as a medical student, house officer, and junior faculty member, sometimes dozing, always conscious of the cocoon of light and knowledge, the lux et veritas, that surrounded me. The great domed reading room of the British Library, the reading rooms of the New York Public Library, the periodical room of the Biblioteque National in Paris are some of the library spaces that invariably produce similar feelings, that involve the excitement and anticipation of fermentative estivation with the written word. Autumn and libraries are visceral as well as visual and intellectual events. Entering a library and walking through the fall colored woods evoke an emotional response, a sense of hope and awe and joy. The beauty of autumn strikes the same chords of emotion as a familiar library meeting room. Indeed I find myself seeking them out, not always for the work or the beauty, but for the inspiration of just being there. Familiarity has a lot to do with the experience. Autumn comes every year, books do not change. Words, as with color and odor, elicit emotion. Powerful words provoke powerful emotion. Despite the surface calm, the woods and libraries are seething with debate and creation. Their liveliness, however, is dressedin comfortable apparel. Forests and books are flammable. Trees and books burn and are burned. They can be cut down and torn apart. Their fragility makes them targets for exploitation and censorship. Their destructibility inspires thoughts of getting along without them. Discarding paper eliminates dependence upon trees for the fiber to make the paper. Contemporary pundits claim that paper and books are no longer necessary. Later, en route China
The magazine of the Sunday New York Times [l] that same day contained a colorful article about a “virtual office,” describing a Manhattan advertising office as a “remarkable work of art.” “People are calling it the virtual office-a workplace designed for the age of the cellular phone, the computer modem, and the mobility that such devices have made possible.” “What keeps them (the staff) hovering there is a radically fluid arrangement of space,devised to keep the firm
in a state of creative unrest. There are no private offices.There are no assigned desks. There are no straight corridors leading past square secretarial carrels guarding hushed executive offices. Nor is there a whiff of the imposing hierarchical atmosphere that such conventional layouts reinforce. Instead, they have created the architectual equivalent of a brainstorm: 29,000 boisterous, loosely organized square feet, bursting with color, form and wit.” “The urbanist William H. Whyte has documented how New Yorkers use the street as an outdoor office, spreading their newspapers atop mailboxes as if they were desks. Such scenes can’t be reproduced precisely here; this is a ‘paperless’ office, where even the jottings on wall-mounted chalkboards are electronically recorded and filed. Still, the roving, makeshift way of working here does recall the vibrant pulse of street life. Indeed, the ‘virtual office’ turns out to be very much like the city downstairs: all those electronic extensions have not eliminated the need for social condensation, the random contacts, and the unplanned interruptions of unmeditated life in the round.” Here was the apotheosis of the exact opposite of a library: a startling glimpse of the future, a sort of brave new world of the coming “information super highway.” Libraries are just as intellectually vibrant and busy as the “virtual ofice” is purported to be, they just don’t show it or allow boisterous business to distract. Libraries are a place for reflection, for solitary action. The coming virtual library will have none of this homeliness, privacy or quietude. Like the virtual office, the virtual library will be a place for bustling Brownian motion, not a place in which to linger. The new contemporary office as a place of creative unrest will not nurture meditation or quiet conversation or reading. The virtual “whatever” seems to me to be a stark collection of naked machines, uncomfortable, ersatz and empty. If libraries are temperate, then the new world of the cellular phone and the computer modem is tropical, producing titillation not topsoil. The tropical forest has no autumn or spring, the heat and
Second Thoughts
moisture are so intense and continuous that organic matter is recycled, used up quickly. Nothing organic accumulates except shallowrooted or moving creatures and when cultivated, the soil quickly becomesbarren. I like the slower pace and cooler clime of autumn and
1287
libraries, where good dirt accumulates and lets living things set out deep roots. REFERENCE
1. Muschamp H. Its a mad, mad, mad ad world. New York Times Magazine; 1994; October 16: 64-69.
08!&4356(95)00002-X
1995
Copyright (2 1995ElsevierScienceLtd Printedin Great Britain. All rights reserved 0895-4356/95 $9.50 + 0.00
Second Thoughts AN AUTUMN
REVERIE: LEAVES, AND LIBRARIES
TREES,
BOOKS
RICHARD V. LEE* Department of Medicine, Children’s Hospital of Buffalo, 219 Bryant Street, Buffalo, NY 14222, U.S.A. (Received 30 November 1994)
Sunday 16th October 1994
the library are alive with the aura or discovery, I was driving from Dixville Notch to the sense of coming upon, opening up a new area. Manchester, New Hampshire, today. A brilliant Autumn is a muted season. The tree colors sunshining day, the White Mountains velvet are warm like the soft colors of leather bound in autumnal colors: russet, gold, orange, red books. Sunlight illuminates leaves like the lights deciduous leaves contrasting with the sober on a library table illuminate the pages of a book, green of pine and fir. The three-hour drive along transforming them into shimmering, iridescent Interstate 93 has vistas of the Ammonoosuc sheets. The scent is robust, redolent with cycles and Pemigawasset River Valleys, and the of living, the aroma of accumulating wisdom, curious rock formation of the “Old Man of the the smell of leather. The resulting murmur of Mountains” at Franconia Notch. It was a quiet conversation, pages turning, leaves talking serene, solitary drive through one of temperate in the wind and falling to the ground, are sounds nature’s most observed events. For no particuof respectful silence that fill the fall forest and larly obvious reason other than the ambience and my joyful response to it, I was struck by a the well-tended library. Autumn is the crucial connection with libraries and books and leaves season of temperate ecology, without it the midsections of the northern and southern hemiand trees. spheres would be infertile, unsuitable for agriFond memories of some of the great libraries of the world, for the libraries of my youth, and culture. Deciduous tree leaves fall and slowly for my own work space and library fed a reverie rot into humus, the fundamental fertilizer that on similarities, the affiliation of leaves and trees, makes topsoil. Libraries, derivatives of trees, are books and libraries. There is something com- fertile fields for learning and writing. Autumn fortable about autumn, like well worn shoes and and libraries are not graveyards or dead-end blue jeans, old friends, and libraries. After all, storage. Autumn and libraries symbolize and libraries are composed of a myriad of old contain beginnings, nourishment, and nurture. friends: books, ideas, people. The essence of a Perhaps it was the aura of latent fecundity, of library is similar to a Franconia Notch or a high fermentation, that shaped my woodsy, seasonal mountain pass: a well-defined space that opens library metaphor. The reading room at the Medical History upon vistas: intellectual, emotional, and sensory Library at the Yale School of Medicine is one comings in and goings out. In a library there is a clear order, geographic and mental, but a of these autumnal sites. It is a large space great sense of freedom as well. The confines of with high vaulted ceilings, with floor-to-ceiling shelves filed with Vesalius, Laennec, Rhazes, *All correspondence should be addressed to: Richard V. Sydenham, Osler, a plethora of scientists and Lee, M.D., Department of Medicine, Children’s Hospital of Buffalo, 219 Bryant Street, Buffalo, NY 14222, doctors. The leather bound chairs for reading U.S.A. and the oak work tables are sheathed by 1285
1286
Richard V. Lee
lights that create a discrete luminescent cubicle. I spent many hours there, as a medical student, house officer, and junior faculty member, sometimes dozing, always conscious of the cocoon of light and knowledge, the lux et veritas, that surrounded me. The great domed reading room of the British Library, the reading rooms of the New York Public Library, the periodical room of the Biblioteque National in Paris are some of the library spaces that invariably produce similar feelings, that involve the excitement and anticipation of fermentative estivation with the written word. Autumn and libraries are visceral as well as visual and intellectual events. Entering a library and walking through the fall colored woods evoke an emotional response, a sense of hope and awe and joy. The beauty of autumn strikes the same chords of emotion as a familiar library meeting room. Indeed I find myself seeking them out, not always for the work or the beauty, but for the inspiration of just being there. Familiarity has a lot to do with the experience. Autumn comes every year, books do not change. Words, as with color and odor, elicit emotion. Powerful words provoke powerful emotion. Despite the surface calm, the woods and libraries are seething with debate and creation. Their liveliness, however, is dressedin comfortable apparel. Forests and books are flammable. Trees and books burn and are burned. They can be cut down and torn apart. Their fragility makes them targets for exploitation and censorship. Their destructibility inspires thoughts of getting along without them. Discarding paper eliminates dependence upon trees for the fiber to make the paper. Contemporary pundits claim that paper and books are no longer necessary. Later, en route China
The magazine of the Sunday New York Times [l] that same day contained a colorful article about a “virtual office,” describing a Manhattan advertising office as a “remarkable work of art.” “People are calling it the virtual office-a workplace designed for the age of the cellular phone, the computer modem, and the mobility that such devices have made possible.” “What keeps them (the staff) hovering there is a radically fluid arrangement of space,devised to keep the firm
in a state of creative unrest. There are no private offices.There are no assigned desks. There are no straight corridors leading past square secretarial carrels guarding hushed executive offices. Nor is there a whiff of the imposing hierarchical atmosphere that such conventional layouts reinforce. Instead, they have created the architectual equivalent of a brainstorm: 29,000 boisterous, loosely organized square feet, bursting with color, form and wit.” “The urbanist William H. Whyte has documented how New Yorkers use the street as an outdoor office, spreading their newspapers atop mailboxes as if they were desks. Such scenes can’t be reproduced precisely here; this is a ‘paperless’ office, where even the jottings on wall-mounted chalkboards are electronically recorded and filed. Still, the roving, makeshift way of working here does recall the vibrant pulse of street life. Indeed, the ‘virtual office’ turns out to be very much like the city downstairs: all those electronic extensions have not eliminated the need for social condensation, the random contacts, and the unplanned interruptions of unmeditated life in the round.” Here was the apotheosis of the exact opposite of a library: a startling glimpse of the future, a sort of brave new world of the coming “information super highway.” Libraries are just as intellectually vibrant and busy as the “virtual ofice” is purported to be, they just don’t show it or allow boisterous business to distract. Libraries are a place for reflection, for solitary action. The coming virtual library will have none of this homeliness, privacy or quietude. Like the virtual office, the virtual library will be a place for bustling Brownian motion, not a place in which to linger. The new contemporary office as a place of creative unrest will not nurture meditation or quiet conversation or reading. The virtual “whatever” seems to me to be a stark collection of naked machines, uncomfortable, ersatz and empty. If libraries are temperate, then the new world of the cellular phone and the computer modem is tropical, producing titillation not topsoil. The tropical forest has no autumn or spring, the heat and
Second Thoughts
moisture are so intense and continuous that organic matter is recycled, used up quickly. Nothing organic accumulates except shallowrooted or moving creatures and when cultivated, the soil quickly becomesbarren. I like the slower pace and cooler clime of autumn and
1287
libraries, where good dirt accumulates and lets living things set out deep roots. REFERENCE
1. Muschamp H. Its a mad, mad, mad ad world. New York Times Magazine; 1994; October 16: 64-69.