The weight of ideas

It was in the middle of one of New York’s coldest winters that I first trudged up to the Stephen A Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street, the New York Public Library’s (NYPL) main building. My professor had asked us to find out the origin of the phrase “seeing is believing” and I was warming up to pore over heavy books on etymologies and idioms. As soon as I stepped out of the subway station and saw the grand Beaux-Arts style, marble building guarded by two equally majestic lions, I knew I had come to a magical place. Last week, the building was back in news as two historic rooms — the Rose Main Reading Room and the Bill Blass Public Catalog Room — were reopened after two years of renovation.

The Rose Room was first open to public, along with the rest of the building, in 1911. In 2014, one of the 900 plaster rosettes that adorn the 52-feet high ceiling of the room fell. NYPL took the opportunity to conduct stress tests on the entire ceiling, reinforce all the rosettes, restore the chandeliers, and recreate James Wall Finn’s mural on the adjacent room’s ceiling. The project cost $12 million. In the reopening ceremony on October 5, NYPL’s president Tony Marx emphatically declared, “This great space, the greatest public room in this city, is now reopened to all.”

To go back to my first visit, the books on the origins of idioms had been shifted to one of the smaller rooms. As I waited for the librarian to get them for me, I made my way to a relatively empty table. When I sat down opposite the only other person at the table, I realised why. The man was homeless. His shopping cart, with all his belongings in it and reinforced with rope, was behind him. And like all homeless people, he strongly smelled of dampness and urine. Since I didn’t want to appear rude by shifting to another table, I continued to sit there, intermittently holding my breath. As a gesture of politeness perhaps, he put his book down, got a stick of deodorant out and rubbed it over his coat. It didn’t help.

He was reading a book on rock formations. I don’t know whether he had borrowed it from the library and was actually reading it or if he had found it somewhere and was just pretending, so that he could enjoy the heat the NYPL provided on a 10°C day. Either way he moved his dirt-crusted finger over the words with the same reverence the rest of us in the room did.

NYPL has 92 branches across Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx, and holds 51 million books, e-books, and DVDs. The Schwarzman Building has its storage below the adjacent Bryant Park and houses 4.3 million books of which about 52,000 reference books are stacked in the reopened Rose Room and the Bill Blass Room. None of the other branches is as spectacular or as visited as the Schwarzman Building but they are spaces that enable residents in different ways. My local branch, for instance, provides English lessons for migrants and Chinese film screenings. Art classes, poetry readings, performances, exhibitions, and political debates are held especially at the Schwarzman Building.

When the Schwarzman Building was opened to public on May 23, 1911, the first book request it received was for NI Grot’s Nravstvennye Idealy Nashego Vremeni (Ethical Ideas of Our Time) . Every library anywhere in the world is a testament to the belief that knowledge matters. Unlike a school or university, a public library offers everyone — irrespective of age, resources, and homelessness — the opportunity to learn. Supporting a library is not about clinging to a pre-Google and pre-Kindle nostalgia but creating a physical space where people can experience the weight of ideas.

In the class after my first trip to the Schwarzman Building, students discussed the contradictory information we found about the origins of “seeing is believing” and shared the side discoveries we had made. After collecting our notes, the professor declared that he just wanted to see where we would go to look for the “truth”.

Our easy access to information instead of making us more knowledgeable and, hence, more critical is narrowing us into clicking and believing the “top result”. We need more books and more libraries; more labyrinths of reference stacks to understand the multiplicities of truth.

Blessy Augustine is an art critic based in New York

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