Guest Post: “Libraries and Civilization” by Jo Walton (& Giveaway!)

In 2004, I went to the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston, and after the con I went with some friends to see the Mary Baker Eddy Library and its amazing Mapparium, It’s a globe made entirely of stained glass which you can walk inside – it has room for maybe a dozen people. It has amazing acoustics, which the guide encouraged us to test. People were doing various things, and I did my standard thing I do when asked to “say something”, Keats “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer”. I’ve been using it for mic tests for years. Inside the globe it sounded wonderful, even more wonderful than usual, because of the acoustics and because of being surrounded by the glowing glass world. It’s a sonnet about the amazing wonderful power of reading. In it, Keats is all excited about having read Chapman’s translation of Homer. He compares reading it to finding a new planet and even to discovering the Pacific.

“Let us trespass at once. Literature is no one’s private ground.”

Something rather different from CR’s usual fare. But I was inspired today, by the review I refer to below. Hope people find it interesting.

I’ve been reading the latest issue of The Atlantic, which is probably my favorite magazine: the mix of politics, history and arts features is excellent, and the quality of the articles usually of the highest quality. I came across an article about Virginia Woolf that stood out for me. “The Education of Virginia Woolf”, by Benjamin Schwartz, is a review of The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 6: 1933-1941, the final collection (edited by Stuart N. Clarke) of the author’s writing leading up to her suicide in 1941. Strangely, I can’t seem to find any evidence of the collection being published – recently or in the near future – in the United States, but it is available in the UK, published by Random House.

I have never read anything by Woolf (much to my detriment, it seems). I do, however, seem to be surrounded these days by Virginia Woolf scholars and aficionados (Alyssa is both, for example), and frequently coming into contact with articles about or that reference the author. Schwartz’s review is well-written – if a bit thin, but I suppose there’s not a whole lot one can do with a volume of collected papers, unless it’s ground-breaking or scandalous). The piece does, however, contain a couple of nuggets of information about Woolf’s thoughts on reading, as well as the story behind a couple of the articles in Essays...Vol.6.