A Good Time

If ever you wanted to know why reading books is so important and necessary to the quality of life itself, then you must read the PDF version of Michael Dirda’s beautiful guest lecture “Looking for a Good Time: Reading, Libraries, and the World of Books.” The address was given at Oberlin College in 2002 under sponsorship of the Friends of Oberlin College Library. Dirda is a graduate of Oberlin. You can find the PDF for download at https://www2.oberlin.edu/library/friends/talks/2002.dirda.pdf. I wish that I could reproduce the whole of it here.

Michael Dirda was then Writer and Senior Editor for the Washington Post’s Book World. He had already won the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism in 1993. He won a Mystery Writers of America Edgarâ Award in 2012. He still writes for the Post. His address on this day included memorable quotes from distinguished authors, some of which citations succinctly capture the tone of his address.

First, know that just about every written, public communication from the Murrysville Community Library Foundation has this quote from Andrew Carnegie: “A library outranks any one thing a community can do to benefit its people.” True in Carnegie’s time; true now. Thank you Connie Cauvel.

From Tom Clancy, much read novelist: “The only way to do all the things you’d like to do is to read.” There is not free time enough in life to travel all the Earth, nor are there means to time-travel, backward or forward, other than by reading (H.G. Wells “The Time Machine,” for example). For those of you who receive Delmont Public Library’s (DPL) weekly on-line posting, Clancy’s quote was the headline banner for the November 24th edition. Thank you for the reminder of it DPL and Michael Dirda.

To the same point, as cited in Robert Frost’s words: ““two roads diverged in a yellow wood,’ and he was sorry that he couldn’t travel both.””

To Bertrand Russell is attributed: books “rouse and stimulate the love of mental adventure.” But Dirda adds a truth (already in 2002): “Once schools encouraged reading as the key to academic success; nowadays, more and more of them emphasize computer literacy over traditional literacy.” “I don’t bewail any of these developments. My real regret lies elsewhere. I sense that the focused reading of books, the valuing of the kind of scholarship through years spent in libraries, is no longer central to our culture.” A lot of Dirda’s address is a loving lament.

And from Italo Calvino about revered books of another time: ”The classics are books which, upon reading, we find even fresher, more unexpected, and more marvelous than we had thought from hearing about them.”

And a last word from Michael Dirda: “Harried businessmen drop into friendly bars, neglected housewives try on cashmere and silk, adolescents simply mope. I do none of these things. When the world is too much with me and there’s a damp November in my soul, I go to the library.”