Sunday, January 04, 2009
Mercado: ‘Republic of Letters’
By Juan L. Mercado
Sidebar
“OUR civilization, the depth of our awareness about underpinnings of culture and concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries,” Carl Sagan, Cornell University’s director of planetary studies made this observation in the journal Cosmos.
This came to mind after City Hall sprang the news: the 69-year-old Rizal Memorial Library will be padlocked. City consultant on education, Joy Augustus Young says closure is set after the Sinulog bash this month. Acting Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama approves.
This is an institution, built in 1939, by contributions of our parents’ generation.
They understood better, than today’s officials, what the inscription above the Berlin Royal Library’s entrance meant: Nutrimentum Spiritus (Food for the Soul). Indeed, one can sit in a library and sail off, like frigates, everywhere, Emily Dickenson wrote.
No public hearings were conducted for on closure plans. So, may this graying taxpayer weigh in?
For half-a-century career, we’ve worked as journalist, foreign correspondent, and United Nations officer. This career is now drawing to a close. Did we work with a modicum of competence, let alone panache, from Rome to Jakarta and New York? If we did, that came, in no small measure, from this soon to be closed library.
Librarians (Mrs. Tormis and Mrs. Muana, if I recall right) opened the world to then grade school kids in Cebu Normal School.
We read thru children’s books first. The Curlytop series led to Edgar Rice Burrough’s series on Tarzan, Zane Grey westerns, Perry Mason crime novels. They, in turn, opened later, for us Dante, Rizal, Shakespeare, Churchill, etc.
A dying classmate, who co-discovered Rizal Memorial Library, murmured his regrets over how alcohol wrecked his life and family---in the words of the Rubayyat: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on…Not all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line.”
How different, one reflected, from kids who sat in the movie aisle before us; they couldn’t make heads and tails out of Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac.” Who sealed off this world of beauty to them?
This experience is not unique. The historian Horacio de la Costa writes of how a “madman” stocked the Ateneo library with three copies of “Wizard of Oz.” But there was method in Fr. John P. Delaney’s madness, he said. Soon students were reading Frank Merriwell, Nero Wolfe, etc. “By fourth year, we were reading David Cooperfield…We got a teacher in the art of reading.”
In a globalizing competitive world, those who don’t read will get the short end of the stick. But Rama, Young & Co argue: City Hall is broke. That’s only half true.
Over P1.3 billion has been siphoned by yen-loan repayments for Mayor Tomas Osmeña’s South Reclamation Project (SRP). More bills are forthcoming. All the city’s eggs were lumped into one basket by Mayor Osmeña. No city has ever become an engine of growth on just one project.
SRP has drained funds for essential services, denials notwithstanding. City roads are moonscapes. Water shortages are spreading. Medical facilities are primitive. Malnutrition is rife. Cebuanos today have the highest per-capita tax burden for repayment of yen loans.
It is equally true to say that there has been money. But skewed priorities have seen bulk diverted away from essentials. A P138-million legislative building may soothe councilors’ egos. But they do not meet basic human needs for clean water, sanitation, medical care-–and essential items like a good public library.
There is, after all, “no such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the free public library,” philanthropist Andrew Carnegie once wrote. “This (is a) republic of letters, where neither rank, office nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.
(juan_mercado@pacific.net.ph)
Cebu City Public Library in Death Row
Originally Posted by brownprose
That's bad...
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