My dear daughter, in the summer of 2014 you were just one year old. You were chirping gently, a foamy book in your hands or in your mouth, when the former Minister of Education of Quebec Yves Bolduc slashed budgets for the purchase of books in schools. “Not a child is going to die of it,” he said. A folly that the City of Trois-Rivières is preparing to reproduce. Foolishly.
According to Radio-Canada Mauricie (December 12, 2022), you can fear that a great saber blow will soon strike the shelves of the libraries you have been around since your birth: “reduction of opening hours, disappearance or reduction of animation activities , major reduction in the acquisition of new volumes, reduction in the promotion budget”.
My daughter — would you mind? —, this decision risks damaging — a little more — the reputation of the Mauricie which, according to the 2022 National Portrait of Quebec Public Librariesis dead last in terms of the accessibility of its collections (The dutyOctober 17, 2022) and fails with a score of 58% in the biblio-quality program of the Association of Public Libraries of Quebec.
I am writing to warn you, my daughter, to warn you, to equip you. Be careful that one day—it’s inevitable—other cities will ape the elected officials of Trois-Rivières. You will then be required to explain to them that reading and literature, like beauty, are certainly not necessary for life, but that if you don’t have them, you die.
In the collective What does literature know?under the direction of Normand Baillargeon and Kateri Lemmens, an anthology of personalities recalls the importance not of restricting access to books, but of further democratizing their accessibility.
For the poet and psychiatrist Ouanessa Younsi, literature is an open door to knowledge of the Other, but also to self-knowledge. The book will allow you, literally, to live by proxy, to exist through a character, to feel, in a dreamy silence, the perfume of an era that is not yours, and this, in the heart of a world distorted by the omnipresence of noises and notifications.
A meditation also cherished by writer and cabinetmaker Brad Cormier. Without libraries, he writes, his “curiosity would have […] crushed into the windshield of the screen”. Without libraries, Cormier could never have become anyone, anything, anywhere, anytime. Books provoke improbable encounters with him and introduce him, as with Younsi, to knowledge, the only enemy of ignorance.
Books will thus help you (also), my daughter, to express yourself better, to communicate more effectively. Without the books, you can, yes, affirm that you prefer the chips ketchup, but you won’t be able to talk about the existential questions that breathe life into humanity. Why do you exist? What is death? How to name the world? How to inhabit it, protect it so that it does not disintegrate? How to animate it and play a positive, constructive role?
Books will provide you, my daughter, with the information required to exercise your democratic duty. As with the teacher and youth author Yves Nadon, the books will allow you to distinguish information from propaganda, news from fake news. The books will lead you to decode the signs, to understand them, to use them so that you become an informed and wise citizen.
Books, my daughter, will develop your critical thinking and your empathy. They will teach you to love the Other, to worry about others. The books will lead you to honor other things than columns of figures in an accounting budget. As for the philosopher and literary Normand Goulet, books will become for you a place of otherness and experimentation, a place of thought, beauty and goodness, a place of knowledge and expression, a place of invention and an inexhaustible source of imagination.
Finally, books will teach you, my daughter, that you have to resist. You must be indignant at the foolishness of elected bibliophobes who know nothing of the inexhaustible wealth of books. Books will always push your gaze further back to the horizon of a world that will constantly want to restrict it.