Anecdotal Evidence: `It Extends the Self’
by Patrick Kurp
“My high school had no library worthy of the name `book,’ so I would walk about a mile downtown to the public one to borrow, in almost every case, a new world. That’s what a library does for its patrons. It extends the self. It is pure empowerment. I would gather my three or four choices, after deliberations governed by ignorant conjecture, and then before leaving, I would sit at one of the long, wide tables we associate with the institution now, and read a page or two further than I had while standing in the stacks. I scorned the books deemed appropriate for my age, and selected only those I wouldn’t understand. Reading what I didn’t understand was, for one blissful period of my life, the source of a profound, if perverse, pleasure.”
cont…