Today I decided to go and do some work at the State Library of Victoria, one of the great libraries of the world. I have known this place through research, leisure, sadness, joy and just about every other feeling that crosses the heart of an intense young man for over 20 years. It has long been my favorite intellectual playground!
The glory of the library is the Latrobe Reading Room, high up in the dome.
The library was established at the same time as the University of Melbourne -- the other institution that has shaped me. The foundation stones of the buildings were laid on the same day, 3 July 1854, and both owe their inspiration to the first Governor of Victoria, Charles Joseph Latrobe (although he had been replaced by the hapless Governor Hotham by laying day), and the first Chief Justice, Sir Redmond Barry. Barry was probably the most important cultural figure in Melbourne between the 1840s and 1880s, although he is remembered chiefly as the judge who sentenced the bushranger Ned Kelly to death.
Now, the coincidence of the two institutions -- library and university -- is something that a lot of people tend to miss. They exist in the same constellation of ideas about civic culture and social progress abroad in the British world during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Changes in the structure of working life had led to a greater amount of leisure among the working classes, and industrial development had transformed ideas of social mobility. The good use of leisure, and the valorisation of social mobility are the key drivers of the civic educational culture that compelled Latrobe and Barry to establish these vital institutions in Melbourne.
The key revolutionary idea behind the State Library in its first half-century was the availability of the books to all readers. It has never been a lending library, like your average run-of-the-mill suburban library. Regardless of class and social status, education through self-driven discovery was the key charism of the library; opening hours were structured to allow the lower classes to have access to the collections, and attempts to secure Sunday closing met with severe opposition. There were even efforts to make sure that the collection travelled out of Melbourne, by providing a primitive sort of mobile library service to districts that did not yet have a local library. This library was truly the peoples' university, at least the only place of education that laid the welcome mat out for the inquisitive. The nearest rival in this regard was "Dr" Edward Cole's Book Arcade, a truly remarkable oasis of utopianism in Melbourne in its day.
Now, back to the reading room and the title of this post. When I first knew the Latrobe Reading Room, it was a tired and worn out space that had the amiable atmosphere of a long-established gentlemens' club. The skylights in dome had long been covered over, following problems with them not being consistently weather-proof. This was back when one still had to fill out carbon forms to order a book from the stacks. The dome was a haven of silence, apart from the necessary murmurs that echo across a space like this. Generations of novelists, historians and other cultural types have benefited from the evocative atmosphere. This has been a womb to many imaginations. This room was a haven to me when I needed to make headway on some of the chapters of my thesis. A whole string of conference and seminar papers have been conceived, incubated, written, edited, revised and finally turned out in this room.
The reading room was closed for building work in 1999, part of a fourteen-year programme of works that dramatically improved the library from its former dreariness. By the time the dome reopened in 2003, a whole world of technological change had become normal -- iPods, the advance of laptops as a standard part of the scholarly outfit, the advent of third generation internet and so on. These are wonderful things, but I wonder what they have done to our appreciation of silence.
The idea that the State Library should provide a haven of peace and silence can be argued on the same grounds that Norman Lebrecht recently put forward in response to heckling at a couple of concerts in Wigmore Hall. Libraries should be places of shared silence, where we respect the space we each need for the flights of imagination that make learning possible. Others have made a similar point about the State Library here, and here.
Today, I walked around the dome three times to find a space where I was not going to find myself sitting near a pulsing iPod. In that process I ran across seven sets of loud people talking, either to others in the room or on a mobile phone. These people had earbuds hanging around their necks, and a laptop in front of them.
Since I sat down, I have endured four intrusively loud conversations in my immediate vicinity. One was arranging dinner (it's after 5pm). Another was pining for the person on the other end in the mushy language of modern eroticism, delivered by means of webcam on MSN (she kept wanting the other person to stop switching off their webcam). The third was sending a coffee order through on the phone to a friend across the road (it was takeaway, delivered to a room where food and drink are banned). The remaining one was raking over their latest domestic brawl in graphic detail. A fifth conversation just opened -- two girls comparing notes on a boy they've both known in the biblical sense quite recently.
I know we live in an intensively interconnected world. I know that technology has allowed this interconnectedness to be embedded in the way we live our waking hours.
I wonder if our awareness of others as mediated by the phone or internet communications blinds us to the the basics of courtesy to others. Silence is not oppressive when yours is in the service of another's concentration. The place needn't be like some horror story enacted by prim but plump lady librarians, but it would be nice if the main sound one heard from the other side of the room was something other than the hubbub of people comparing notes about a party they went to at the weekend.
Not all silence is oppressive. There are different types of silence. The silence I have always associated with the dome is the amiable type, built around my respect for your need for the space that only silence can give you. This silence is about respecting boundaries, sharing a space that offers sanctuary. This is the sort of silence that can truly be regarded as a basic human need: the silence that allows you and me to think on the large scale, to feed that thinking with the resources to hand, and to respond to these things by a creative act.
The omnipresence of entertainment devices -- mobile phones, mp3 players, social networking on the computer -- has yet to catch up with this idea that silence is a basic human need. Our interconnected world seems to regard silence as a vacuum: the iPod fills the void. How can you think deeply about something when you've got what amounts sensory overload going on in the ears? Technology may have allowed us to expand our musical taste, stay more closely in touch with each other and hastened the pace at which we achieve some things, but the human mind is as much in need of time and space as ever.
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