I Found Myself in a Library

Mark Van Doren

Professor Mark Van Doren was the principal speaker at the first
meeting of the Friends of the Columbia Libraries on May i, igsi.
He has ^written out part of his address for the columns.

IT SEEMS to have been assumed that I would talk tonight upon a
literary topic. But I have been doing that in this university ten
times weekly for more than thirty years, and now that I stand in
the Rotunda of Low Memorial Library I find that I much prefer
to speak of the thing which has brought us together here: the
library, or if you insist the libraries, of Columbia University.
There are thirty-three of those, but to me they are one thing, and
I have lived with it long enough to love it as I love the university
itself. I have lived with it and in it, for it and by it, ever since I
first came to Columbia in 1915 as a graduate student. And of it I
have many memories which I hope you will indulge, however
personal they may sound as I recall them.

If a given library has not a great personal importance for one
or more individuals who use it, then it may have no importance at
all. The idea that learning is going on, or that culture is being ad¬
vanced, is somehow less interesting, to me at any rate, than the
thought that some one man or woman, young or old, and probably
young, is sitting and reading a book and being changed as Whit¬
man, say, was changed by reading Emerson; or Keats by reading
Shakespeare; or Shakespeare by reading Plutarch; or Plutarch by
reading the historians and philosophers who preceded him. This
thing has happened in many a library, and we may be sure that it
has happened here. It is more moving to contemplate than the
doing of assignments or the conducting of research, at least if the
assignments and the research are routine for those who do them.
The solitary person who reads and is changed by what he reads is
probably at that moment the quietest person on earth; but the
earth may become a different place for everybody else because
of his experience with a book.

And the book may not be one that he entered the building to
read. He may find it by accident as he looks along the shelves—as-