ard-catalogue
universe.

I can only speak for one, but I must say for myself, that as compared
with this feeling one has in the door, this feeling of standing over a
library--mere reading in it, sitting down and letting one's self be
tucked into a single book in it--is a humiliating experience.

II

How It Feels

I am not unaware that this will seem to some--this empty doting on
infinity, this standing and staring at All-knowledge--a mere dizzying
exercise, whirling one's head round and round in Nothing, for Nothing.
And I am not unaware that it would be unbecoming in me or in any other
man to feel superior to a card catalogue.

A card catalogue, of course, as a device for making a kind of tunnel for
one's mind in a library--for working one's way through it--is useful and
necessary to all of us. Certainly, if a man insists on having infinity
in a convenient form--infinity in a box--it would be hard to find
anything better to have it in than a card catalogue.

But there are times when one does not want infinity in a box. He loses
the best part of it that way. He prefers it in its natural state. All
that I am contending for is, that when these times come, the times when
a man likes to feel infinite knowledge crowding round him,--feel it
through the backs of unopened books, and likes to stand still and think
about it, worship with the thought of it,--he ought to be allowed to. It
is true that there is no sign up against it (against thinking in
libraries). But there might as well be. It amounts to the same thing. No
one is expected to. People are expected to keep up an appearance, at
least, of doing something else there. I do not dare to hope that the
next time I am caught standing and staring in a library, with a kind of
blank, happy look, I shall not be considered by all my kind
intellectually disreputable for it. I admit that it does not look
intelligent--this standing by a door and taking in a sweep of
books--this reading a whole library at once. I can imagine how it looks.
It looks like listening to a kind of cloth and paper chorus--foolish
enough; but if I go out of the door to the hills again, refreshed for
them and lifted up to them, with the strength of the ages in my limbs,
great voices all around me, flocking my solitary walk--who shall gainsay
me?

III

How a Specialist can Be an Educated Man

It is a sad thing to go into a library nowadays and watch the people
there who are merely making tunnel