I grew up in libraries, or at least it feels that way. My family lived in the suburbs of Cleveland, about a mile from the brick-faced Bertram Woods Branch of the Shaker Heights Public Library system. Throughout my childhood, starting when I was very young, my mother drove me there a couple of times a week. We walked in together, but, as soon as we passed through the door, we split up, each heading to our favorite section. The library might have been the first place that I was ever given independence. Even when I was maybe four or five years old, I was allowed to go off on my own. Then, after a while, my mother and I reunited at the checkout counter with our finds. Together, we waited as the librarian pulled out each date card and, with a loud chunk-chunk, stamped a crooked due date on it, below a score of previous crooked due dates that belonged to other people, other times.
Our visits were never long enough for me—the library was so bountiful. I loved wandering around the shelves, scanning the spines of the books until something happened to catch my eye. Those trips were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived. It wasn’t like going to a store with my mom, which guaranteed a tug-of-war between what I desired and what she was willing to buy me; in the library, I could have anything I wanted. On the way home, I loved having the books stacked on my lap, pressing me under their solid, warm weight, their Mylar covers sticking to my thighs. It was such a thrill leaving a place with things you hadn’t paid for; such a thrill anticipating the new books we would read. We talked about the order in which we were going to read them, a solemn conversation in which we planned how we would pace ourselves through this charmed, evanescent period of grace until the books were due. We both thought that all the librarians at the Bertram Woods branch were beautiful. For a few minutes, we discussed their beauty. My mother then always mentioned that, if she could have chosen any profession, she would have chosen to be a librarian, and the car would grow silent for a moment as we both considered what an amazing thing that would have been.
On a cloudy summer afternoon in Istanbul, my ferry was slowly approaching the port of Eminonu. The view from the deck is something I can never get used to, no matter how many times I do the same trip over the Bosporus. As the sun started to set, the old city was showered in a golden-red colour and the silhouettes of the grand mosques took me back to the Ottoman era.
Among the many remnants of the Ottoman times scattered around this huge city, maybe the smallest – but for sure the tastiest – sits just a short walk from the port, on a small street behind the Yeni Cami (New Mosque) in Istanbul’s Bahçekapı district. It is the Haci Bekir shop, which has sold Turkish delights to sweet-toothed residents and visitors for more than two centuries.
Myers’ protégé, a psychologist named Mary Hawley McCaulley—who helped transform the rather arcane legacy of Katherine Cook Briggs’ infatuation with Jungian psychology into a mass-culture phenomenon—explained it best when she told Emre that a common response to learning one’s type is “Oh, there it is in black and white! My kind of person is okay? All my life people have been telling me to be different.” Oh, the bossy intolerant friends and relatives conjured up by this lament! That human beings are not all alike, that they vary in their preferences for socializing or in their learning styles and the activities they find fun or tedious—all this seems like the most elementary form of social intelligence. We all ought to behave as if this is the case, but plenty of us don’t. It isn’t that introverts (to pick a recently much-discussed type) don’t know that they dislike parties, it’s that they often don’t feel entitled to accept, voice, and act on their preference without a doctor, an author, or a hugely popular but scientifically dubious test to back them up. Their own stories aren’t deemed enough, and whenever someone finds themselves in that position, what they really need is not more self-knowledge, but more power.
In “Reader, Come Home,” Wolf spells out what needs protecting: the knowledge, analytical thinking, capacity for sustained attention and empathy for others inspired by immersion in books. She’s right that digital media doesn’t automatically doom deep reading and can even enhance it. She’s also correct that we have a lot to lose — all of us — if we don’t pay attention to what we’re doing with technology and what it’s doing to us.