In October 2013, The Guardian posted an edited version of a lecture given by Neil Gaiman, that was entitled:
"Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming".
The lecture was given for The Reading Agency, as part of their annual lecture series and it's one of the most important lectures I've read on the subject of libraries and their future. I wanted to do a post, highlighting the quotes I thought were the most inspiring, especially for someone like me who would love a future working in a library environment.
A link to the edited Guardian lecture can be found here.
A link to the video of the lecture and full transcript can be found on The Reading Agency's blog, via their website, here.
Quotes will be in Italics, my own notes in standard font.
I don't think there is such a bad thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children's books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. (...) It's tosh. It's snobbery and it's foolishness. (...) A hackneyed, worn out idea isn't hackneyed and worn out to them.
This is something that really rattles my cage. They're reading...it doesn't matter what it is, just let them read! Comics, books about diggers, the star wars annual, Enid Blyton...whatever!
And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. (...) You learn that everyone else out there is a 'me', as well. You're being someone else, and when you return to your own world you're going to be slightly changed. Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.
The world doesn't have to be like this. Things can be different.
Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.
I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up (...) the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children's library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue (...) They had no snobbery about anything I read. They treated me as another reader - nothing less or more - which meant they treated me with respect.
This is the kind of librarian I aim to become. One that can help develop a space that children feel comfortable being in, and adults feel comfortable leaving their children in. They do not need to be chaperoned around the shelves. Leave them to it, they might discover something.
But libraries are about freedom (...) They are about education (...) about entertainment, about making safe spaces and about access to information.
In the last few years we've moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. (...) We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.
This is something that often worries me. How do I know that the information I'm reading is correct, or unbiased? I don't. A librarian can try to help to filter out the useless, clogging nonsense and leave me with the bits I want, or need.
As Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old; there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is.
Sharks terrify me. But I get the point. They're damn good at being scary though.
A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. (...) It's a place of safety. a haven from the world.
Vulnerable people, or people without access to the internet, can become cut off in this world in which much is done via a screen. Libraries are important for social interaction and gaining access to information via the internet. Email, job applications, council information. Being in an environment in which they can have help with things a lot of us take for granted.
...our children and grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. (...) They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable.
Books are they way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us.
Spooky. But a nice idea. As a (sort of, aspiring) writer it might be good to leave a published work behind. Like a memory, so my ideas can live on.
If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.
We have an obligation to read aloud to our children.
We do. I hope to volunteer at some local primary schools this year to help children with their reading. A few southern children may come away with a slight northern twist on their accent, but hopefully I can help do some good.
We all - adults and children, writers and readers - have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. (..) the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining things can be different.
On quoting Albert Einstein: "If you want your children to be intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." He understood the value of reading and imagining.
Such a well though out lecture, making some crucial and inspirational quotes in proper Gaiman style along they way. What a guy. I admire this writer so, so much. I hope these quotes ring true with others out there also.
Over and out.
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