While on holiday in France last week I visited three public libraries - in Annecy, Reims (pictured) and Troyes - and was struck by how quiet they were. And I mean really quiet; not in the English sense of ambient chatter frequently punctuated by an 'RnB' ring-tone, which you find in our better public libraries, but quiet to the point of a cathedral-like silence. It's probably the nearest I have had to a religious experience since I became an atheist.
What is it about the French that their libraries are so quiet? Well, on closer inspection everyone seemed to be reading, which can only help. What's more, there were no computers. None of the clicking of index fingers on mice that represents the thin end of the noise wedge. The French are clearly not worried about the 'digital divide' to the same extent as the British are. No People's Network for them. Maybe the divide doesn't really exist, or maybe it does and the French authorities just don't give a shit. "Can't get access to your local council's website to complain about a missed bin? Tant pis. Why don't you try reading a book or journal instead?" Makes sense. The French intellectual culture has always concerned itself with the bigger, transcendental issues, while the British equivalent tied itself in knots over trivial detail. (OK - I know a missed bin is never trivial when it happens to YOU, but I'm talking about the grand scheme of things...).
So maybe silent libraries are not for us? Opting for freeze-dried information rather than oak-matured knowledge we Brits have invited the computer terminals in, and it looks like they are here to stay. Also here to stay are the AV suites, the group-working areas, the bean bags, the coffee bars, the clowns with the sausage-dog balloons, not to mention the GP's clinics, Citizens' Advice Bureaux, and the one-stop council shops. You can almost see the sound waves bouncing around. Anyone hoping to read anything longer than a blog-post faces an uphill struggle in such an environment.
If it's any consolation, I should point out that absolute silence is also an uncomfortable aural background when reading. Enter a sound-proofed room and it suddenly seems like your ears are not working properly, as if they need to 'pop' because of a pressure differential across the ear drum. And it's not just a strange physical sensation; it psychical too. The lack of all ambient noise seems to remove you from the world more completely than would any sudden plunging into darkness, and experiencing absolute silence reminds you that life and change are experienced as much through hearing stuff as they are through seeing stuff: we do like to hear something when we read. Even when we are wholly immersed in a book there is a little part of our brain that likes to anchor itself to the here and now, while our eyes are otherwise occupied. So although we might like to think we are escaping into the past or future when we read, really we are dragging the book's author into the present to make his case anew.
Low ambient noise in libraries is therefore a usable silence. It's like a comfortable but upright seat; it allows the reader to root himself and at the same time reach further into that other world that has been fashioned from the written word. The problem here in Britain is that provincial public libraries just can't do ambient: they are too small and so every sound is pretty much in your face, round the side of your head, and down your lughole. Without your local authority having adopted a Gallic attitude towards books these libraries are impossible to read seriously in.
The newer, larger libraries that have opened up in British cities in the last decade show more promise. With good acoustic design their reading areas can be positioned so that only low ambient noise is heard, but even this can be monumentally buggered up by other considerations such as the need to create a 'community space' (a good article on how acoustics seemed to play second fiddle to a whole host of other priorities in the construction of Norwich Millennium Library can be found here: http://www.adrianjamesacoustics.co.uk/papers/forumnorwich.pdf)
A particularly good example is the British Museum Reading Room, which is fantastic for low ambient noise provided that users are quiet in the first place. But a well-positioned mobile phone conversation could wreak havoc in there. Good job it's only a tourist attraction and not the real thing! Ultimately, therefore, these great-to-be-in spaces are never going to be any good for reading in unless their users actually are reading. So even in the best library buildings it's not so much that we need silence in order to read, more that we need to read in order to create silence. Silence is not the condition for reading but the reward for our efforts. It is a validation of our decision to not accept the world at face value and to start digging for ideas.
I really envy the French their libraries. I also envy their ability to read French. If I were French I'd be back there in a trice, enjoying the peace and quiet of their intellectual labours. But in the English-thinking world the aural landscape inside the library is quite different. We might enter a library to borrow a book, but probably not to read one. As a society we have largely lost the desire to uncover the world and to use ideas to get beyond first appearances. And so we have lost our ability to achieve a collective silence.
The obvious solution for anyone who cares is to learn to read French and move to France. For those of us who can't or won't, the alternative is to complain loudly about the noise levels in our public libraries, and to start dragging some important authors off the shelves and into the here and now.
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