Sitting in a library…like I am doing now…does something to me.

I feel smaller in a library than I did when my dear wife, Carrie, and I were standing at  a place called the Devil’s Golf Course in the Mojave Desert inside Death Valley National Park, California.  The vastness of the physical wide open space one finds in the Grand Canyon or looking into a star-filled sky on a lonely country road or listening to the sound of absolutely nothing but your heartbeat in a solitude farm like Devil’s Golf Course is no comparison to me as the vastness that I experience as I am in the company of shelves and shelves and shelves of books.  Home to ideas that came to fruition and somehow managed a way to find the light of day through publication…the library.

What started with a light bulb of a moment over the head, or a heartache that manifested itself into a tome that will be followed and studied, or a two line poem by Ezra Pound that still gets a shine of a spotlight in college classrooms, or a humorous story that entertains children as it teaches a lesson, or a compendium that will lead a student in the direction he or she is looking for, or a compilation of comic strips to share for laughs, or a biography to learn about or from…stories…good and bad…are on these shelves.  Lives are on these shelves.

Perhaps I should not be so appreciative.  Maybe I should be more desperate.  Well…I am not.  I speak of my appreciation for those who have made it to the book shelves as one who has not.  Did I write a book?  Yes, a novel.  It is near 75,000 words.  Do I wish it would find an audience?  Yes, I do.  Am I satisfied that it has not?   Maybe.  Otherwise I would be raging hard against the editorial machine that holds so many back.

I know this: I am proud of my work.  I am proud of the fact I completed a large volume of work I had a joy penning.  It has helped me immensely as an English teacher.  I have not knocked myself out trying to get it published.  I am VERY careful with this.  This book will either get the treatment I believe it deserves or it will not find its way to bookshelves plural. I am fine with that.

I have never looked at a bookshelf in a library or a bookstore thinking I deserved to be there. I have never been jealous of a title on the shelf.  How can I be?  I am just very fortunate I was given a piece of material with which to work and produce something I am very proud of.  It is already important to me.  I have gotten more out of the story I wrote than I ever put into it.  Call me Minnie Pearl.  I’m just proud to be here.

Over the years I have had a few folks ask me about the novel I wrote.  I finished it a few years ago.  Friends are surprised to find I am not frustrated with its solitude.  This is not to say that I don’t think it could entertain a good audience.  I suppose there is a time for everything.

In the top left drawer of my desk in my home office, a business card sits and is jostled around now and again, I suppose, given a couple of its corners are wearing a bit.  The card is from the…

BERKSHIRE ANTHENAEUM                                                                                                    Pittsfield’s Public Library

This is the public library of Pittsfield, Massachusetts.  “ANTHENAEUM” is a fancy sort of word for library.

Carrie and I visited this place last summer.  Inside the Berkshire Anthenaeum is the Herman Melville Room.  This room has the best collection of Herman Melville’s personal affects you will find, I think.  Melville was a prolific writer. His Moby Dick clocks in at well over 200,000 words.  He wrote other classics including Billy Budd.  The whale story, however, is probably why he has a room named after him inside a New England library with a fancy name.  Nearby Mount Greylock, and its whale shape, proved inspirational for Melville in writing his most famous work.

This is me trying to look intelligent outside the Berkshire Anthenaeum.  It  doesn’t work out very well for me.

I always admired another New Englander, George Plimpton, for looking so blamed intelligent.  Even before he opened his mouth to pour out his intelligence, he just looked like the smartest guy in the room.  The night I was in the room with Plimpton, I wrote about it on this sight some time ago, he was the smartest guy in the room.  Maybe it was a tie between him and Millard Dunn.  That or Millard had him beat.. slightly.

Speaking the Literary Rights.

Danny Johnson