Of labyrinths and libraries

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Jorge Luis Borges, "Poema de los Dones"

Despite never having been breastfed, I think my brother and I turned out alright. Sure, growing up my health ran rather haphazardly, but I have long since decided to accept my perpetual sniffles, embrace my eternal phlegm. I am often riddled with gastric discontent, hypoglycaemic flashbacks and non-athletic syndrome; on good days, I’ll brave a five-minute walk in the sun. Do I fault my mom for her lactose-lacking crime, worthy of sanctions by the World Health Organization? Is she to blame for my not being as smart as I should’ve been?

Modern ’90s parents do everything they can to produce little geniuses, from blasting Mozart in the womb to buying expensive SAT preparation software for toddlers. At an unholy age, young children are already Internet savvy, play four different sports, the piano and the violin, are learning dead Slavic languages, seeing a shrink and doing advanced algebra. But alas, my time was the disco transition days of the late ’70s-early ’80s, and the world was still flat. There were no infinite windows, no multi-user dimensions, nor hyper texting tribes – only Atari 1600 consoles, the Sesame Street channel, and room aplenty for roaming imaginations. My mother may have malnourished me and my brother from 0-6 months, therefore, setting us back a couple in the mickey mouse race, but to her credit, she taught us how to read and shoved books in our face at a rather early age.

My mother, daughter of a pastor, had been wandering spiritually for a decade before the Lord struck her with a fiery brimful of conscience, and so ran she to the nearest church with air-con, clutching her infant son. Luckily, there happened to be a little lending library staffed by the American women volunteers of the church, put up back in 1949 in an effort to address the lack of bookstores, and particularly reading material for children at the time. My brother, a precocious young reader, was devouring books quicker than it was worth buying them, and this library provided an interesting collection of children’s books, mostly donations from the expatriate community who would come and go, but always leave their books behind. Their balikbayan burden became his daily bread.

I followed suit four years later, but at a slower pace (I was dropped in the shallow end of the gene pool). So there my brother was, reading Dr. Seuss at three, finishing off the Hardy Boys hardly six, and launching into the Narnia Chronicles at nine. When I came of age, meaning I was old enough to sign my own library card, I myself spent considerable time perusing the seemingly labyrinthine rows, pulling out musty old books and inhaling its silverfish scent. From the frustratingly opaque Babar to the exotically foreign Paddington Bear, animal picture books called to me till I came to the spunky adventures of Beverly Cleary’s Ramona and the pre-teen angst of Judy Blume. Charlotte’s Web made me weep first, and I’m sure everyone would say the same. One’s first library is where one first falls in love – with discovering imagined worlds, with indulging in freedom of choice, and not least, with being alone.

The great ancient library of Alexandria, which housed a collection of 700,000 original scrolls, was razed to the ground by Christian extremists in their effort to purge memory of anything heretical or superfluous to the Bible. My little Union Church of Manila Library shut its doors in 1999, disappearing into cloudy rubble in order to make way for a bigger, brighter church. The structure that now stands at the corner of Rada and Legaspi Sts. in Legaspi Village, Makati is a blue and white behemoth of a building, a mismatch between a mosque, rocket ship and nuclear reactor. It reopened in 2001, the same year when the super high-tech, architecturally bewildering and Borgesian Bibliotheca Alexandrina was unraveled in loving tribute to its knowledge-hoarding past. Parallels? Probably not. But the new library, nestled in the basement within the circular chambers of UCM, held its Dedication Ceremony last Sunday, Aug. 10, and personally it was also a small commemoration to the highly susceptible formative years of my own abrupt history. All libraries are special creatures, whether they be small understaffed cooperatives dependent on donations, or richly massive national legacies to the printed word.

I don’t know what the little punks and Harry Potheads of today think about library use, what with instant access and better-stocked bookstores and more foul things to watch on TV. Yet there remains something authentic and rare about a single shared book that has been in circulation for longer than you, passing through ageless hands and opening eyes over and over again. Visiting the refurbished, expanded library for the first time in more than a decade, I wondered if I could retrace my nebulous steps through juvenile fiction, would there be ghostly remnants tucked between the pages, perhaps a spectre of my younger self, feeling thrilled and excited, escaped with possibility?

Speaking of ghosts past. I pull out A Christmas Carol, flip to the back and slide out the mangled check-out card. There in my familiarly terrible handwriting I had proudly scratched my name, next to a stamped 1989: "A. Carpio." Cool. I look past this first shelf, beyond which lies the grown-up books, from mysteries to spirituality and all that in between, bound copies of human thought resting comfortably in inertia, all the while threatening to explode. Worlds of references, and so little time – an entire garden of forking paths, unpaved and simply waiting to be traveled through.

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The UCM Library is located on level B2 of Union Church of Manila, cor. Rada and Legaspi Sts., Legaspi Village, Makati. For info on opening hours, contact 812-6062.