I admire Martha Quest, the heroine of Doris Lessing’s five-book Children of Violence series, one of the great thinkers of Lessing’s very smart fictional world.  In The Four-Gated City, the last volume in the series,  Martha and her employer, Mark, a factory owner and science fiction writer, read multiple newspapers to track world events on complicated maps and charts on the walls in the study. 

Lessing’s description of the maps fascinates me.  It goes on for pages, but here’s an excerpt.

One wall was soon devoted to atom bombs, hydrogen bombs, large bombs, small bombs (what one committee in the States had christened “kitten bombs”) and the establishments which developed them, made them, and sold them…  With black flags, on the same map, were marked the factories and laboratories which researched, made and sold materials for germ warfare, chemical warfare, and drugs used in the control and manipulation of the brain.  With yellow flags, on this map, were marked areas of air, soil and water contaminated by bomb-blasts…

This was published in 1969.  I can’t imagine that the maps would look much different today. And that’s very sad, isn’t it?  But on the bright side… we’re still here!

In The Four-Gated City, an American character, Brandon, questions the maps on the walls of Mark’s room. “Why do you fix your room up like this? Because the way it looks to me, it’s just stating the problem.” 

Mark asks him if it isn’t valuable to state the problem.

Brandon points out that protests, too, are just stating the problem, and that people seldom have the energy to take the next step.  And, I must admit, that was what I thought after protests on No Kings’ Day.  Great as far as they went. What next?

Before I go on, let me say that I, too, state the problem and take no action.  But then I operate on a much smaller scale..   

Here is the kind of problem that obsesses me.  Due to city budget cuts, the  local public library recently fired its last librarian.  

My first impulse was to protest at a City Council meeting.  As far as I’m concerned, the public library is a human right.  It provides books, books, books (that’s all I care about),  computers, meeting rooms, movie clubs, lectures, cooling centers in summer, and, for a while, social services for the homeless (but those were cut too.)

I expected rioting in the streets after the news of the firing.  Nothing.  A few letters to the editor. 

It hardly seems cost-effective to fire the librarian and social worker, and leave the management to the check-out clerks, who, though they may be lovely people and avid readers, are the equivalent of supermarket cashiers.  But there’s already an X on their backs.  Since most patrons use auto-check, the check-out clerks are next. Bets on?

A former librarian tells me she is glad she got out in time. Her gloomy prognosis?  The library schools are next. 

She was a cataloguer, and I must share this funny insight.  She said the the highlight of her career was “having catfights about whether to catalogue Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant as science fiction or literary fiction.”