I walked over from Tom's house on Capitol Hill to the Library of Congress, this great 1893 monument to knowledge, to learning, to art and architecture. A relief it is there after eight years of an administration that put so little value on these keys to the human experience. And imagine having this edifice a few blocks away from one's home. Anyone can get a library card. I suspect there was some competition between this building and the public library on 5th Avenue in New York which must have been built around the same time. But, hey, Congress could just pass a law that a copy of every book published in the country had to be sent in. That's one way to stock the shelves. As stunning as the building and its holdings are, more impressive were the hundreds of school children who visit the library, who see the kind of glorious investments governments are capable of making when their heads are on straight (or not as the case may be).
I was reading the other day (yes, reading) that Socrates was strongly opposed to books and to reading. He felt that learning only really occurred when people were in dialogue with one another. And now we are at a time when books are being joined and perhaps jostled by other forms of communication (videos, blogs, an interactive web). Yet these monuments remain to remind us of the essential commonality of all these forms.
