In Praise of Libraries

Robarts Library saved my life. When I arrived as a Masters student at University of Toronto, I was enchanted by the early 19th century St. George campus modeled on the beautiful buildings and courtyards of Oxford University. I had been accepted to do a Masters and PhD in Comparative Literature and was disappointed to find out I would not be based in any of the handsome historic colleges with their lead paned windows, oxidized copper domes, burnished oak panels, and stone walkways. No, my new academic home would be Robarts Library.

The Comparative Literature department – which was relatively new and edgy in the late 80s and brought in visiting scholars like Vlad Godzich to teach us about deconstruction and linguistics or Simone de Beauvoir to lecture us on Proust – was housed in Robarts Library which rose up on a triangular foundation, constructed of brutalist cement, and bizarrely resembling a peacock if looked at from the southeast. While grad students were winding their ways through grassy quadrangles, entering heavy carved doors framed by classically inspired columns, and presided over by stone faces and figures, I was riding the escalator or taking the elevator to reach my department, lectures, and books.

As a PhD student working on my dissertation, I was assigned an office in Robarts which allowed me to look twelve floors down to the quaint campus below. The past looked like a faraway world while I was in a modernist experiment. While working on Dante’s Divine Comedy, it was surreal to gaze from Robarts’ tall steel-framed windows that protrude from the building’s fa?ade recreating a sense of slender apertures in medieval castles ideal for shooting arrows.?

It wasn’t only me who entered Robarts, crossed the hexagonal atrium, and felt as though I had entered a mysterious fortress offering protection while hiding secrets. Scholar and author Umberto Eco famously used this futurist library to evoke his fictional medieval library The Secretum in The Name of the Rose. Eco’s crime novel presents the library as a labyrinth leaving the reader to decode the key signs, never let go of the thread, and hope to ?find her way back away from the Minotaur’s clutches.?

For me, Robarts was less Greek myth and more Dante’s Inferno. I was using every literary and psychological insight I had to try and spiral down to face my demons so that I might hike up Mount Purgatory and attain some kind of peace. When I left my angular office in Robarts, I would go twice a week to the psychiatric centre at University of Toronto. I’d meet with a few female students and two psychiatrists and talk about my eating disorder and penchant for cutting.?

I talked a lot about myself, but never told them I had been sexually abused in an outdoor education program in high-school. The grooming began at 13 and I escaped into a haze at 17. I had self-destructed into two different people: one was a gifted literary student and the other was consumed with the madness of self-harm. One looked straightforward, healthy, hopeful and the other looked like a monster.?

What healed me was not talking. What healed me was the silence of Robarts Library. It was reading and analysis, communing with writers through their imaginations, beliefs, and stories that gave me the language to finally tell the dark secret that had severed me. Robarts was a fortress that looked to the future. It didn’t shy away from brutality, instead it showed that life has harsh and ugly forms, but that the reader and writer could transform these forms into something glorious.

My first book, Rite of Passage in the Narratives of Dante and Joyce, was a diptych in honour of my divided self. On the left, I explored Dante’s Divine Comedy and on the right, I adventured and learned through the literary landscape drawn by James Joyce. Just like Robarts Library, medieval and modern in dialogue, and teaching us how to let go of the past’s scripting and carve out a writer’s path.