Thread by @SketchesbyBoze

So, I grew up in total poverty in a farming town in southern Texas. By a lucky chance I was able to attend university. The first week on campus I set foot in the student library, and what followed was one of the most transformative experiences of my life. (thread)

https://twitter.com/squarehaunting/status/1999848949868605730

The school's collection of 300,000 volumes seems modest by the standards of Harvard or Yale, but for me it was overwhelming. There were books on every subject I could imagine, and I wanted to read them all. Instinctively I knew this is why I had come to school.

I devoted much of the next four years to wandering the stacks and studying whatever subjects struck my fancy: the origins of the cosmos, the afterlives of Buddhism, alchemical symbolism, glaciers, Gilgamesh - knowledge was abundant and I was hungry for it.

It was in the library that I made some of my most serendipitous discoveries. One morning I picked up a volume of the Arabian Nights and entered a new world. I took home The Pickwick Papers during the holidays and stayed up till daybreak reading it on three successive nights.

They became some of my most beloved books, and I treasure the memory of those experiences because they were instrumental in my decision to become an author. Much as I loved my professors, I learned more in the library than any teacher could ever teach me.

Ray Bradbury, who never attended college, called himself “completely library-educated.” After high school he spent ten years reading in the library hoping to acquire the knowledge he needed to become a novelist. “I discovered,” he later wrote, “the library is the real school.”

And it breaks my heart that students are now graduating college without experiencing the personal enrichment and depth of learning that the campus library can provide. The real education is found in the stacks, and if you're not using the library, you're not getting it.

The years you spend in school provide unparalleled access to the world's literature & learning. Reading in the library daily, you will encounter treasures. You will become interesting. But if you're only in school for the degree, you're ultimately cheating yourself.

The great sin of our age is incuriosity. People are not motivated to learn, they are not motivated to pursue knowledge. We need a generation of students that are hyper-literate, a generation that rejoices in reading. If there's any hope for the future, it begins in the library.