Living With Books: An Appreciation for the Reopening of the Cathedral City Library

In an 1815 letter to John Adams, his friend and immediate predecessor as President, Thomas Jefferson wrote “I cannot live without books,” and it was Thomas Jefferson who offered his entire library to the United States to replace the holdings of the Library of Congress after the British had burned the Capitol (and the LOC) in August, 1814.

At the Cathedral City Library yesterday morning, we shared a Jeffersonian moment. More than two years after the Library suffered a fire and had to close, it reopened yesterday more ready than ever to resume its function as a vital resource for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.

Yet, the reopening of our Cathedral City library is more than just a cause for community celebration. It is a victory for civilization itself. For civilization is a knowledge-based enterprise. History teaches us that the material and mental advances we have come to take for granted happen in urban settings where, as novelist James Michener observed, a library can accumulate texts.

And those accumulated texts -and all the related items we entrust to libraries for consultation and safekeeping- become the foundation on which we educate the next generation, on which we increase our own knowledge, and on which we seek what English novelist Thomas Love Peacock once referred to as “the refreshment of the magic page.”

More than any repository of precious metals or gems, libraries are the treasure-houses of our civilization, whose destruction -either by totalitarians or by barbarians acting out against civilized things- is a crime against civilization.

What does any library -and particularly our Cathedral City library- do for its community?

A library bears witness against our forgetting -or worse, our vanishing. The texts of classical antiquity, the books of the Bible, the suras of the Qur’an, the Vedas and the Upanishads, the teachings of the Buddha and of Confucius, all come down to us because libraries made their preservation possible

A library is a repository of written memory and an insurance policy against the incremental errors that inevitably creep into a purely oral tradition. We can read the plays of Shakespeare, the philosophy of Plato, or the metaphysics of the I Ching as they were written because of libraries.

Libraries are both conservative and subversive at the same time; libraries conserve and preserve the words of our forebears, but many of those words are still considered even controversial and potentially even dangerous to this day. In the same library that has in its collection the conservative views of Edmund Burke may also be found The Anarchist’s Cookbook. The Bible shares shelf space with the Qur’an, and the writings of Chairman Mao with those of his great antagonist Chiang Kai-shek. Pulp fiction reposes next to the searing soul-searching of Dostoevskii. And all of these are available to the reader with the time, the inclination, and the curiosity.

Finally, libraries are formidable things. Where there is knowledge, there is power. Where that knowledge can be accessed by any literate person, without regard to race, creed, color, class, sexuality, gender, disability, or any other invidious classification, democracy can take root. The free knowledge available at a library is a thing precious to liberty and formidable to tyrants, something Thomas Jefferson clearly understood when he wrote those words to John Adams: “I cannot live without books.”

Because none of us can truly live without books, the lack of a fully-functioning library had left our community life in Cathedral City in syncope. Now that syncope is ended, and we who live in Cathedral City can -in our restored and improved library- experience again the refreshment of the magic page.

The views contained herein are my own, and do not necessarily represent the official views of the City of Cathedral City, its Redevelopment Agency, or of any other entity or person.