Worlds of Knowledge Once Unimaginable

December's annual holiday party for Library Associates in the Riggs Library was indeed memorable for the brief address given by Scott Pilarz, S.J., a member of Georgetown's English Department. Thinking that Associates who were not present of that occasion might also enjoy Fr. Pilarz's remarks, we reproduce a substantial portion of them here.

"I am in my second incarnation at Georgetown. I graduated from the College close to twenty years ago. And now I'm three years into an academic career. So I know Lauinger Library as few do: both as an undergraduate and as a professor. I got my start here as a student, cutting my intellectual teeth and then some. I can't begin to tell you all the things I did in the library–and there are some wouldn't want to know. But looking back is not merely an exercise in nostalgia. More than any other place on this campus, it was in Lauinger that my imagination took shape, so much so that the library is sacred space for me.

It was on the library's first floor where, as a shy and awkward sophomore, I first read about the Society of Jesus. I'd sneak between the shelves, lest my friends see me, and pore over books about Jesuit priests. So I owe my vocation more to the library than I do to the chapel–and there may be something characteristically Jesuit about that debt. I remember getting lost in Lauinger for long hours, admittedly not always reading what had been assigned, but browsing through the stacks. Like Shakespeare's Prospero, the library was for me "dukedom large enough.

One of my greatest pleasures as a Georgetown professor is seeing my students work with the very same library books that I once did. But the books are just the start. When I left here in 1981, what did we know from World Wide Webs or learning on line? Cutting edge technology meant borrowing your roommate's electric typewriter. But thanks to your generosity, I can now learn along with my students. Georgetown faculty and students can now point and click our way into worlds of knowledge once unimaginable or at least inaccessible. Research that ten years ago would have required a trip to Rome can now be done at my desk in New North. (I love and hate you for that!) And while Lauinger more than keeps up with what's passing bright, it also keeps faith with the past. Last summer I was working on literary texts that kept referring to a collection of prints published at the Jesuit English College in Rome in 1609. I was convinced that I'd finally found my ticket to a European vacation, but before calling the travel agent, I ran a search on GEORGE. There it was in Special Collections: Ecclesiae Anglicanae Trophaea.

Sometimes on a Friday or Saturday night, late, I'll walk past Pierce Reading Room. The lights are on and lots of people are home. It's a stirring sight: so much energy and enthusiasm for learning. In a handbook written for Jacobean courtiers Henry Peacham writes, Affect not, as some do, that bookish ambition to be stored with books and have well furnished libraries, yet keep their heads empty of knowledge. To desire books and never to use them, is like a child that will have a candle burning while he is sleeping. Peacham's worry is so very far from Georgetown's reality. This faculty and our students are kept wide awake by a love for knowledge, and we see that knowledge by the light of your generosity."