| It?s all pleasant enough: the wide windows, blonde wood, artful splashes of colour, cheerful staff. Then the clank of IV poles and the beeping of monitors reminds you why you?re here in the chemo suite. Life, which once laid choices before you like an effusive shopkeeper, now offers only two: get better or die. The world, which once seemed unbounded, is reduced to home, hospital, and the stretch of highway between.
Illness robbed me of possibility. I had to live in the moment. It?s not as much fun as pop psychologists pretend. All around me, people chattered about Christmas parties, blandly anticipated next summer, spoke of trips to Florida or France. I limped among them, cut off from their glowing worlds, thinking don?t get too tired, keep up the calories, don?t give in.
And on good days, I would go to the Hamilton Public Library. The Central Branch is showing its age. The frayed carpet is now replaced, but the raw concrete walls haven?t mellowed, only tarnished. Light spills down a cascading stairwell, but never quite puddles into some of the remoter stacks. I don?t care. For this place restored the possibility that disease had stolen from me. On its shelves are worlds in which I could live, explore, delight. During my illness I devoured the urbane chattiness of Margery Allingham, the gonzo Chaucerian joy of Terry Pratchett, the jewelled precision of John Banville. One chemo session flew by as The Dante Club whisked me away to nineteenth-century Boston. Another passed in a golden haze as I dozed off over the sinuous sentences of Marcel Proust, their tendrils creeping through my dreams.
At a bad moment, as doctors considered whether to continue treatment, I drew strength from Falstaff?s vitality, transmitted through a crackly cassette tape of Henry IV borrowed from the library. When the unlikely summer arrived, it seemed doubly delightful because a new slice of Jasper Fforde?s lunacy put on hold months ago arrived with it. When I went to Toronto for surgery, library books went with me. My wife read Wodehouse and Stewart Maclean to me when I could barely see through a morphine fog. And when I returned home, no longer able to toss footballs to my daughter, I could still read her the library books she had chosen for herself.
Today I am enjoying, against all odds, a precarious interval of freedom from illness. I dare to dream of summer again. My library didn?t bring me here. But it helped give me the strength to believe that sickness is not the only world I might live in.
Chill realism tells us that we only live one story, and it can only end one way. Libraries refute that notion. They offer vast seas of surmise, stories we can enter and live in heaped up by the thousand. Individual flowers wither and die. The great shining garden blooms on, limitless, heady with the scent of possibility. |