two weeks ago, deep in a book I’m writing on Japan, I desperately needed — what else? — a copy of Isabella Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, the intrepid Englishwoman’s account of traveling, alone, to remote parts of Hokkaido, hardly seen by any Westerner, in 1878. I don’t have access to a research library, and I’m not sure that the travel-diaries of indomitable Victorian gentlewomen are often to be found in the PR stacks in any case. And though Santa Barbara is blessed with some of the finest bookstores on the planet, I couldn’t be sure I’d find a little-known work brought out 137 years ago even in Chaucer’s, The Book Den or Tecolote. So down I went to our great hospital-cum-community-center-cum-sanctuary-cum-chapel on Anapamu Street, tucked (perfectly) between courthouse and art-museum, and pulled down the volume in question. Within seconds, I was stumbling around the tatami rooms and kimonoed rites of Niigata sixty-three years before Pearl Harbor.
I wasn’t entirely surprised to find Ms. Bird tramping across the second floor of the Santa Barbara Central Library; for more than fifty years now, that indispensable structure has been my lifeline, my oasis, my reason to believe. Each of its volumes opens out upon an entire universe, of course; but for decades I’ve gone there also to keep up with The New Republic, Publishers’ Weekly, NewYork and any number of fine magazines I’m too stingy to buy. Friends of mine from Japan have all but lived in the Central Library, the one place in town so quiet and safe that they might (almost) be back in Japan. I’ve tapped away on the Library’s Internet terminals, attended exhibitions and lectures in its Faulkner Gallery, even caught up on my thoughts (my sleep) in its astonishingly deep armchairs. Whenever I’m off on a trip, I head to the second floor, armed with dimes for the photocopying machine, and defraud some poor guidebook writer of his royalties.
Five years ago, after my eighty-year-old mother went through back surgery, she began to howl in pain. I raced into her bedroom and asked her what I could get her from downtown.