Sitting with history

On the buildings that make us feel small (in a good way)

I’m back, after a little break from posting, with the most tenuously ‘seasonal’ post ever (seasonal because… churches?) Anyway, I hope you are all resting up, chomping through plentiful food stores, and leaning into the season in whichever way seems fitting.

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A week or two ago I happened upon a Substack post by the actress

Sian Clifford

entitled ‘Take Me To Church’.¹ I clicked on it because, as I explained in this essay, religion is a pool I like to walk around and contemplate, and I generally prick up my ears when it sounds like someone might be gearing up to talk about what it means to them. But as it turned out, the post in question wasn’t about religion or churches at all. It was about books, and the ‘churches’ in question were libraries.

For some reason, I’d never before thought to equate churches and libraries. Once the comparison had been served up to me on a plate, however, lights went on in my brain. Sian Clifford — who only meant the equivalence as a passing illustration of how much she loves books — has no idea of all the cogs she’s set creaking into motion. (Thanks, Sian.)

Churches and libraries are similar in literal ways as well as metaphorical ones, of course, and often in ways that I enjoy: old, large, quiet, full of history, open to everyone, and no one expects anything of you when you go and sit in one. (I’m generalising, don’t @ me.)

I spent the first decade of my adulthood working towards one degree or another; long after most of my peers had left university behind and started frequenting offices instead, libraries remained the common theme of my days. There were cavernous old ones with high vaulted ceilings, chilly ones where the wind whistled around the windows, modern ones with light pouring in from above, boring ones with magnolia walls and unlovely furniture. Always there was that musty book smell, the incidental noise of people sitting around thinking, and the comparative ease with which you could shut the world out.

I have an office job myself now, so I’m not a library-dweller anymore. I might spend the odd weekend afternoon writing in the public library down the road, but that’s about it. And yet, as you may recall if you read this post, I often find myself craving the time and space to be quiet and contemplative, hunting it down in yoga classes and Quaker meetings and — yes — churches. Only now does it occur to me that this search might have become necessary because I no longer have libraries in my life.

A space I like to frequent, in my quest for quiet, is this one particular church. It’s a five minute walk from where I work and I usually go there at least once a week on my lunch break. I really like the smell, which is just standard issue old church smell (not dissimilar to old library smell, now I think about it). I suspect my fondness for it is rooted in nostalgia, because although I didn’t grow up in a religious household, I did go to a Church of England primary school. As a child, being in a church meant being out of the classroom for the afternoon, preparing for some some sort of production or concert instead of doing lessons.²

So churches were a constant in one era of my education; libraries were a constant in another. Education always suited me, a people pleaser with a taste for writing, and I wonder if churches and libraries are a comfort to me now because they are a reminder of some of the times in my life when I’ve felt most truly myself, most truly excited to be alive.

But perhaps my favourite similarity between libraries and churches is that both, I think, are spiritual places. I don’t mean I go to either with a view to worshipping anything, be it God or books. What I mean is that ‘spirituality’, in its broadest sense, is about feeling in touch with something bigger than you are, and a reliable way to feel in touch with something bigger than you are is to do things and frequent places that make you aware of your own smallness.

We are small in space and we are small in time. I generally look to nature for a reminder of my smallness in space — not just the parts of it that are bigger than me, like trees or mountains or the sea, but also the veins of a leaf or a froth of fungus or a trail of ants, or anything that reminds me how vast and mysterious are the intricacies of this planet, and how much of it is beyond my experience and comprehension.

Libraries and churches are reminders of our smallness in time. In Swann’s Way, Proust imagines a little village church as a ship sailing the centuries. I love this idea: the church a huge vessel covering years instead of miles, each generation of congregants and visitors joining for a fraction of the voyage. Many European churches were born old, taking so long to construct that they were already aged in human time when they were still in their church-time infancy. Westminster Abbey was built over the course of 500 years. Imagine working on a building knowing that neither you nor your children, grandchildren or even great-grandchildren would live to see it completed. What must it have been like to dedicate your life to a task that dwarfed it so completely?³

Libraries can be humbling in a similar way. Writing, thought and ideas are, as Katherine Rundell put it in a recent article for The New Statesman, ‘the song that humanity has been singing for thousands of years’.⁴ Libraries house this song, or rather parts of it, and in so doing they remind us how long it is, how complex, how polyphonic. They remind us that we can never hope to hear it all, and that our own individual contributions to it will never amount to more than a few bars. Going down to a library basement to retrieve an old book from the barely-accessible stacks in which it has sat unread for an untold number of years is a useful reminder (especially if you are an egotistical author or researcher) that most lives make a very tiny mark, if they make one at all. Very few change the tone or key of the song, and almost none change it on their own.

You could find this depressing, or you could find it awe-inspiring. After all, the only reason our lives are so easily dwarfed and our contributions count for so little is because we are part of something rich and enormous and largely unknowable. Churches and libraries, I think, give us the opportunity to sit with our own smallness — and therefore, ultimately, with the infinite vastness of everything else.

Happy Christmas to all who celebrate.

‘Til next time,

Kx

1. Sian Clifford as in Claire from Fleabag! The very same! Her Substack proves her to be so different from Claire that I am awed all over again by what a great actress she is.

2. The teacher most often in charge of all these productions happened also to be my father. He was very beloved — favourite teacher material — so I never had to be embarrassed by him when he was being Mr. Brook, even though I would later be deeply embarrassed by him when he was being Dad.

3. This makes me think, sorrowfully, of how much easier it would be to solve the climate crisis if we still approached things with this level of long-termism and humility.

4. I am misrepresenting this excellent metaphor if I don’t explain that Rundell uses it to advocate for greater access to books for children: ‘It’s in writing that we’ve preserved our boldest, most original thought, our best jokes and most generous comfort. To fail to do everything we can to help children hear that song is a stupidity for which we should not be forgiven.’ AMEN.