library anxiety

At least since I was in high school, I have loved libraries so much that to step into a library sometimes turns my stomach. I especially feel queasy among the stacks, no matter whether they are the relatively modest rows of bookshelves in the adult non-fiction section of the Simsbury Public Library or the many stories of dusty bookshelves in Sterling Memorial Library. Both excitement and dread cause the queasiness. I want to read everything; I will never be able to read everything. When I was an undergraduate, the reference room at Sterling (pictured above) also triggered nausea, because I associated it with the Oxford English Dictionary, whose volumes were shelved there and which I often thumbed through, seeking for an idea for whatever paper I had due next.

The phenomenon of library anxiety was first theorized by Constance A. Mellon, who wrote about her findings in a short, readable article [PDF] in 1986. She based her theory on the study of the personal writings of college composition students who over two years wrote about their experiences using the library for research. In her analysis, she found that “75 to 85 percent of students in each class described their initial response to the library in terms of fear or anxiety.”

In some of the writing quoted by Mellon, students describe the library as a kind of labyrinth. Mellon writes, “One student claimed she felt like ‘a lost child,’ another that she was ‘lost in there and actually scared to death,’ while a third declared, ‘I, as many freshmen, was lost in the library for a very long time. It was like a big maze to me and was easy to get lost in.’” In other quotations, students describe the library as a kind of leviathan. Mellon writes, “A student explained, ‘I relate my fear of the library ... to its large size,’ and another declared that ‘the largest library I’d ever been in seemed like a small room compared to this.’ Instead of a paragraph, one student produced a list of words that included ‘big, expansive, vast, majestic, awesome.‘ Another declared, ‘The library seems like a huge monster that gulps you up after you enter it.’”

The awful pleasure that I sometimes feel in a library is kin to this anxiety. Its labyrinthine vastness reflects—and amplifies—a quality of my mind that I enjoy but that at times threatens to overwhelm me: which is that I never have just one idea. With each new idea, two or three or four others spring into mind. As a writer, I set myself to the task of lining up these ideas, which so often feel enmeshed with each other, impossible to untangle. But somehow I must find a way to place my ideas in a sequence, because of course my readers can read only one sentence at a time, one after the other, over the course of time.

Pity our leaping, associative minds, which must contend with time. To step into a library is to perceive the contrast between the immensity of possibility and the limited self. There will never be enough time to read all the books, nor enough time to chase down all my ideas, get them on the page.

I am glad, then, that books exceed their seeming self-containment. Each book that I do read touches on so many others, because via their footnotes, citations, bibliographies, quotations, allusions, tropes, themes, and so on, books are networked. As Adso, the narrator of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, comes to understand, they speak to each other:

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

None of the students Mellon cites write about the library in this way, though it is so: haunted, full of ghosts. I am pleased to keep such company, disturbing as it may be.

Because I never have just one idea, I have planned a series of posts on various affective aspects of the library—on the pleasures of labyrinths, the architecture of libraries, the experience of attending library school during this pandemic, and more. And yes, I will certainly write about literature’s most famous librarian, Jorge Luis Borges. Until next time, xox