OOO la Library!

I can't remember the last time I was in a library that had books about music, art, drama, theatre, philosophy, literature, acting, comedy, dance...oh, yes, I remember, it was in Calgary, when a trip to the University of Calgary library was a day long affair, a dangerous incursion into places out of which I may not emerge, a playground of fun that wrapped its seductive tentacles around my ankles and kept me captive so that I missed classes, appointments, and the daycare closing time.  (Sorry Lorraine if my absentmindedness has led to some insecurity on your part.)

This library at the Banff Centre just gets right down to business, and I don't mean that there are copies of the Economist at the front entrance.  No, right there at the front, to the left, are thousands of classical music CD's just waiting to be listened to, and to the right, the literary and other arts journals.  It's a strange feeling because I'd forgotten, holed up as I've been in the provincial world of the two-year college in small town British Columbia where the trumpet call of the past few decades has been "training for jobs, jobs, jobs", I'd forgotten that there can be, that there are, places that forgo that particular linear and profitable obsession and actually embrace and support the world of the creative imagination.

I spent a good part of the afternoon reading about aesthetics.  I was actually looking for something about metaphor, but the closest I came to what I was looking for, and it's not actually quite good enough for my project, was this:  "metaphor may be thought of not as a way of revealing hidden truth but simply as a way of supplementing the other resources of language."  p. 263 of The Structure of Aesthetics, by Sparshott, 1963.  Not quite enough, but a good start.  What I'm trying to do is pull apart the function of metaphor, to find something that has been written, more recently than 1963, about how metaphor can help to enhance meaning and also about how it may obfuscate meaning.  I'm more interested in the latter, because I think enough has been said about the former.

While reading, I watched a thunderhead move towards the library where I was sitting on a comfortable chair surrounded by floor to ceiling windows.  I think the library may be my hangout for the next few days, with all that light and all those books and all that music.  And when I stumbled down the stairs, my knees still locked and stiff from sitting still for so long, I noticed that the buttons on my sweater were out of sync.  Sheesh.  I really don't care, you know?  I spent the afternoon in a library!  Who needs symmetry?