Worlds Within This One

Talita writes about the thirteen years she spent learning how to be a librarian.

The post is a love letter disguised as a warning. The first time I read it, I felt it was reframed sadness. But rereading it today while drafting this post, I found myself chuckling at her rants, and finding inspiration in her finding her world within this one.

Two wisps in particular stay with me. The first was:

That a collection of documents is greater than the sum of its parts. … And that it would only reward you if you could be among it alone, in silence, and over an undetermined length of time. … I cared very little about information, I cared about documents.

This is, I think, the first time I see how a library is not just a collection of books, it is a thing in its own right.

And the second is the one she leaves us with:

There are many worlds hidden within this one, and all one really has to do is look. But that there is little tangible reward for those who do look, except, maybe, that it is the only thing worth doing.

Or, as the lines from Fernando Pessoa’s Mar Português she quotes put it:

Valeu a pena? Tudo vale a pena
Se a alma não é pequena.

“Was it worth it? Everything is worth it / If the soul is not small.”