I was asked, recently, what I believed a library was for. The honest answer took me three days to find, and even then, it arrived in the form of a question.

A library, I have come to think, is the only building we still build in which silence is the principal architecture. Everything else — the shelves, the lamps, the long oak tables — is in service of it.

The Argument for Silence

We do not, as a culture, build many places for silence anymore. The churches are emptying. The cinemas are loud. The parks are full of small bright rectangles. The library remains — stubbornly, gloriously — a place in which one is permitted to think a thought all the way through to its end.

“A library is a cathedral in which the saint being venerated is the reader.”— from the lecture

A Closing Thought

I do not know what the next century will demand of us. I suspect it will demand, among other things, that we learn again how to sit still with a difficult sentence. The library is where we will practise.