TESTIMONIAL
When I was twelve, my mother moved my sister and me from our home in Tallahassee to Florence, where she was studying art history. With airy disregard for the Florida School Board, she deemed it unnecessary for her daughters to attend school during the year we were in Italy. Instead, we went to museums in the morning and every afternoon made our way to the British Consulate Library, where we read until nightfall, when my mother came to collect us. The library overlooked the Arno and with its leather chairs, racks of newspapers, ceiling-high stacks of books, and plush silence resembled an English gentlemen's club. My sister and I were left alone to read and browse without supervision, and at year's end I returned to the cultural shock of life as a sixth grader in Tallahassee, but that is another story.
The British Consulate Library afforded an almost fairy-tale sense of being out of any particular time or place. The intensity, the quality of my reading during this single year I have never matched; much had to do with my age as well as the luxury of displacement, but also, obviously, much had to do with the physical setup of the library itself-its deep chairs, its gentle lighting, its contented, sedate quiet. The only occasions on which I catch a whiff of that faraway year are when I open the heavy doors of the Society Library Members' Room on a slow day and stroll into a familiar, deep, imperturbable calm. Although I have used the Library for research, occasionally for writing,
it is this single room that exerts the greatest pull on me -a place where one can read and have the world fall away.
|