Donde Esta La Biblioteca?

Drab and dismal days, which are common during Portland winters, have their way of painting most activities in black and white portraits. The sliver linings are grey at best, and the rain beats against windows and rooftops like an insidious question, asking for an answer much more frightening than the question itself.

On days like these, I enjoy going to the downtown library.

As a friend pointed out, the downtown Portland library is an establishment in the throes of an identity crisis. On the one hand, it must maintain the images and expectations associated with libraries: intellectualism, literacy, a vault containing the catalogue to the world’s greatest ideas, historical events, disciplines, literary and musical achievements. What is a library if not the celebration of the one artifact responsible for sculpting the ancient world into the modern one: the written word.

But, the downtown Portland library has another dimension to it, reinforcing one of life’s most recurring lessons: there are always two sides to a coin. The side I speak of is the one to which the police respond when they are told there is a fight ensuing on the front steps. It is the one that trains the librarians to negotiate with the constant influx of transients and their plastic garbage sacks of clothes. Most of all, this is the side juxtaposing the esteemed reputation of this library’s overbelly with a shady but equally shiny underbelly.

I am finding the downtown Portland library is an ideal place to get a true dose of culture in its organic form (opposed to the little siphoned increments of colorfulness often mistaken for true portraits of society and its denizens). Here, we main-line humanity: the bum reads the newspaper next to the geology professor; the graduate student exchanges greetings with the addict changing his clothes in the bathroom; expensive perfumes share the air with potent body odor; texture from a book’s ancient page mingles with matted hair that has not been washed in a long time.

And no one blinks an eye.

Waking up this morning to a moist, rainy and windy spring farce was not, in my opinion, fertile ground for inspiration, let alone motivation. But, hurrying in through the thick wood and brass doors to get out of this relentless inverted bog is the first sip of an awakening. The smells and faces of my comprades are ripe with difference (not indifference!), one of the many reasons I am falling deeply in love with the downtown Portland library.