Text in Context

I note this week the Spotsyltuckian myth of a little boy, riding on a bus, in Brooklyn, to Sheepshead Bay, hand in hand with mother, to sign up for a library card. In the beginning there are always words; the first thing a Spotsyltuckian always does when he moves to town is march wife and clan to the library for cards; this last time, knowing we were newlyweds, the wise librarian announced, 'if this is what's most on his mind, more than all the other myriad duties common to moving, he must be a keeper,' --(good for the new mother-in-law to hear this kind of news in person).

During a holiday craft show in an elementary school, last weekend, we wandered around the pint-sized library. The same kind of books lined the shelves that started my journey four decades ago: ghost story compendiums (in the day it was an Alfred Hitchcock Presents...these were uniformly Potter-ish), and legendary stories of Jim Thorpe, Knute Rockne, the Four Horsemen, Babe and Lou.

Garrison Keillor, in a Post essay, captures the feeling well, writing, "I leaned my bike against the wall and snuck inside. I didn't take the elevator for fear the lady operating it would ask me the purpose of my visit and I would stammer and turn pale, so I climbed the stairs past the Egyptian mummy on the third floor landing and headed for the children's room and the toasty smell of brand-new books. I plopped down and read them, one after the other. Nobody yelled at me, nobody told me to stop reading..."

Sounds like a holy sanctuary, eh? Yet, that word today, sanctuary, turns as all words, on context. It's been that way since the beginning of recorded time. The original tribal inhabitants of Palestine, the Canaanites, initially communicated in the 800-symbol cuneiform fashion developed by the Mesopotamians, where every syllable required a symbol of its own. It didn't work efficiently, as a language for use in contracts and bureacracy (though, come to think of it, we use a similar form of shorthand in emails today), so the Canaanites reduced the alphabet to 24 characters by elminating vowels. Usage became conditioned on context: for example, if you were implying an object belonged to 'our' family, writing "or," unless the object in question was martime-related, meant 'our,' not 'oar.'

The context of sanctuary became crucial when I had to decide whether to welcome or turn away a guest at our faith-based shelter if I possessed the undesired knowledge he was a wanted man. The deciding ethical factor usually turned on the context of the crime, whether outstanding warrants for driving on a suspended license, say, as opposed to murder, or as to what danger he presented to the surrounding community of which I was also a responsible member. In 19th century France, Hugo's Quasimodo employed the word in 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame," within a similar church/state context. In the context of recent political debates, politicians accused of governing a 'sanctuary city,' for example, have rendered an otherwise noble word into an ignoble epithet.

According to the Times, prosecutors "questioned the Turkish publisher of the book "The God Delusion," by a British author, Richard Dawkins, after a young reader complained that it was offensive." In that context, if I was in power, it's not the tack I'd take since I haven't understood anything yet this brilliant scientist has written. I'd leave the book on the shelf, knowing even if someone discovered it, amongst millions of other books in massive public libraries (like the crate containing the Ark of the Covenant in a huge warehouse at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie) they'd more than likely attempt the first chapter and quit in total confusion.

In the New York Review of Books, the equally brilliant, but more readable British author, William Dalrymple, described a time in 16th century India where "in an atmosphere comparable to Lorenzo de' Medici's Platonic Academy in Florence a century earlier, these enlightened Mughal rulers invited scholars and priests from around the world to their court, hosting them in their palaces and fielding weekly interfaith debates into the small hours of the morning."

That's the university context of learning for which I'm totally nostalgic; all night political debates, capped by the publication of a manifesto, the likes of which you might only be able to purchase today for fifty cents from a cart in the alcove of the City Lights bookshop in North Beach. Friend Mark writes of a time at UNC-Chapel Hill when a mandatory reading assignment for freshman on the story of a young Muslim caused a brouhaha. As Mark reports, the chancellor, responding to reporter's questions, said "what they learned from the book, and subsequent discussions, meant that the assignment had been successful in generating the thoughtful and analytic discussions they were seeking from students preparing for college." Or was it, for the chancellor concluded, that while he knew the course hadn't caused anyone to convert from Christianity to Islam, the "official religion of UNC had always been, and always continue to be, basketball."

As I age, I reject something I once read that "there are no lessons to be learned from sports," since I carry much that is noble from those first stories, in the elementary school library, of Rockne and Gehrig. I find, to gain the most from reading, like Thomas Merton, the Benedictine monk, who'd go to bed by 6 p.m. and awaken at 2 a.m. (rather than the college students I know today who go to bed at 2 and awaken at 6.), "it is necessary for me to see the first point of light which begins to dawn. It is necessary to be present alone at the resurrection of Day, in blank silence when the sun appears. In this completely netural instant, I receive from the eastern woods, the tall oaks, the one word "Day" which is never the same. It is never spoken in any known language."

Sitting in the soft enveloping recliner, facing the north window, at sunrise, under a quilt, coffee in hand, book in lap, gazing up at our woods, I welcome the day, with newly discovered ideas. This is the context of personal sanctuary; the holy duality of peace and learning. What began in the bustling Brooklyn neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay continues in our home in Virginia, fed and enriched beyond measure, by the seven far-flung town and country branches of the regional public library system.