“Despite popular theories, I believe people fall in love based not on good looks or fate but on knowledge. Either they are amazed by something a beloved knows that they themselves do not know; or they discover common rare knowledge; or they can supply knowledge to someone who’s lacking. Hasn’t anyone found a strange ignorance in someone beguiling? An earnest question: what day of the week does Thanksgiving fall on this year? Nowadays, trendy librarians, wanting to be important, say, Knowledge is power. I know better. Knowledge is love.
People think librarians are unromantic, unimaginative. This is not true. We are people whose dreams run in a particular way…
Unromantic? This is a reference librarian’s fantasy.
A patron arrives, says, Tell me something. You reach across the desk and pull him toward you, bear hug him a second and then take him into your lap, stroke his forehead, whisper facts in his ear. The climate of Chad is tropical in the south, desert in the north. Source: 1991 CIA World Factbook. Do you love me? Americans consumed 6.2 gallons of tea per capita in 1989. Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States. Synecdoche is a literary device meaning the part for the whole, as in crown heads of Europe. I love you. I could find you British Parliamentary papers, I could track down a book you only barely remember reading. Do you love me now? We own that book, we subscribe to that journal, Elvis Presley’s first movie was called Love Me Tender.
And then you lift the patron again, take him over to the desk and set him down so gently he doesn’t feel it, because there’s someone else arriving, and she looks, oh, she looks uninformed.“
–Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant’s House
(No, I’m not posting while in class–I’m testing Scribefire’s timestamp feature. Yay for plausible deniability!)
