Library Depressing

Forgive my delay in responding to Diane Calkin’s commentary (“Is America’s Worst Library in ‘America’s Finest City’?” Feb. 21), but I’ve been feeling less literate since coming to San Diego County. I have lived in and passed through a multitude of American cities, but never have I been anywhere with such a depressing system of libraries.

Culture should be available to everyone free of charge. Since Proposition 13, museums and special parks, once free, now charge fees which shut out people of even moderate means. Libraries, which remain open to everyone without any questions asked, are all we have left.

Books--the written word--are the legacy of a literate culture. Ray Bradbury understood this in “Fahrenheit 451” (the temperature at which books burn) by having people (the dissidents, the independents, the survivors) memorize and recite the texts of literature. Where did he write this book? In the Venice Public Library on a public typewriter.

Since I was a child, I have spent untold happy hours in libraries. I have loved being surrounded by and checking out books. My home is full of my own books, but it’s not the same as a library, where the world opens up to us in a limitless way. It’s special. It’s magic. You can read and write, reference and research to your heart’s desire, and it’s free!

Sundays and evenings are lonely without a library to fill the long hours. Oh yes, I too visited the downtown San Diego Library, but I found it depressing. So little tax money is spent on it, as if it weren’t important. It’s not aesthetic, it’s not inviting; it’s depressing. I did find a two-hour parking meter blocks away, but once in the library I didn’t feel relaxed, at home, as if it were mine. I longed for a Carnegie Library somewhere else, or a Portland or a Pasadena edifice. Where was the beauty?

Trapped in timed parking, I found even the library clocks were not in working order. It was time warp in more than one sense. Taped over the clock face in the periodical room was a prophetic message: WRONG TIME. At last I felt someone understood.

NANCY DUREMBERG DREW

San Diego