Dear Librarians
Walking to my local library this week, I was brought up short by the sight of Raising Hare on temporary display in the window. I felt a lump in my throat to know that my book had entered the bloodstream of the great living network of libraries globally.
I cannot remember a life before reading. I can recall to this day the thrill of being given books as a child and then, as a teenager, the even greater excitement of choosing them myself: the unfurling of a sense of self with each new discovery, each a little more daring. I made my way, magpie-like, through the local mobile library, my school library, my parents’ shelves, and my grandfather’s bookcases. “Could I borrow this?” I would ask, half-showing, half-concealing, the perhaps-too-adult volume I had chosen.
Reading is a bridge between the soul and the world. For every urge, longing, question or problem, there is a book. For every stage in life, there are authors to shed new light on human experience. Nothing compares to the intensity and nuance of the feelings evoked by reading. As with human relations, the worst response a book can elicit is indifference.
My closest friends are those to whom I can say, “Can I tell you about the book I just read?” Who I know will then listen to my faltering efforts to describe the incandescent feelings produced by a dazzling story. Like the attempt to recall a dream in daylight, something elusive always remains out of reach in the retelling. But trying to put into words the effect of someone else’s written word is one of life’s pleasures. And how often, with a stranger, does the question “Have you read…” not mark the start of a great friendship, if not love? “More than kisses, letters mingle souls,” as the poet put it.
The silence of libraries is warm and comforting because of the sense they give of being with likeminded people: all seeking out, preserving and sharing books for similar purposes – in pursuit of knowledge, on the path to self-expression and to ease the burdens of human existence.
Reading books brings all those rewards, but it turns out that writing them does, too. My book, Raising Hare, tells the story of a chance encounter with a wild animal and the joyful, dream-like experience that followed, as I lived alongside this elusive, beautiful and much-misunderstood creature. “In nature’s infinite book of secrecy/ a little I can read,” says the soothsayer in Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra. The hare cracked open the pages of that book and inspired me to produce my own. If reading it gives you and others a fraction of the pleasure and interest I felt writing it, I will be very content indeed. And I have no greater hope than that it might be borrowed and borrowed.
Chloe
