>> From The Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> Ladies and gentlemen, please
welcome the 14th Librarian
of the Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden.
[ Applause ]
>> Carla Hayden: Wow.
Good evening and welcome to
the 2016 National Book Festival
Gala Celebration.
This is my first public event as
the new Librarian of Congress,
and you guys [applause] - and
it's also my first opportunity
to welcome a large gathering
to your nation's Library.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
This is a wonderful,
wonderful way to begin.
Our program this evening is
being live streamed on YouTube,
so thousands of people outside
of this room and outside
of Washington are able to join us,
and I think that's so important.
To be able to share the collections
and programs of The Library
of Congress with as many people
as possible is my priority
as Librarian, and it also builds on
the legacy of my 13 predecessors.
Now this event is one of
the highlights every year,
and I am honored to
be here with you.
It's a National Book Festival
that brings together our
greatest authors, poets,
illustrators with their many
fans, and I'm one of them,
that includes all of you
joining us here tonight.
I want to thank a few people
because no event like this happens
without a lot of work by
a lot of different people.
We have members of Congress here.
The United States Congress has built
and sustained this Library and I'm
so appreciative that you're here
to celebrate this achievement.
The Library of Congress is
one of the greatest gifts,
the legacies that the
Congress has given.
Thank you.
Also, thank you to the Embassies
of Italy, Latvia, Mexico,
Spain and Uruguay for providing
us with such wonderful talent
for international and
[inaudible] stages.
I want to say a special hello
to Ambassador Carlos Gianelli
of Uruguay who is with us tonight.
[ Applause ]
Also joining us this
evening are the many sponsors
who make this event possible.
Mr. David Rubenstein,
the Festival's Co-Chair.
[ Applause ]
AARP - you may clap.
[ Applause ]
The Institute of Museum
and Library Services.
[ Applause ]
The Washington Post.
[ Applause ]
Wells Fargo, FedEx.
[ Applause ]
Scholastic, The National
Endowment for the Arts.
[ Applause ]
The James Madison Council
of the Library of Congress.
[ Applause ]
And there are many others.
Because of your generosity
this Festival,
and I think this is the
most important part,
is completely free to the public.
So thank you, thank you, thank you.
[ Applause ]
Plus there are more than a thousand
volunteers who give their time -
Library of Congress staff, the
general public, the Junior League
of Washington, and our introducers
from the Washington Post,
National Public Radio and
numerous other media organizations.
And speaking of Library staff I have
had the privilege to get to know
so many of them in a short period
of time, and more than two dozen
of them have worked for nearly a
year on planning tomorrow's events
which will offer the most
impressive lineup of authors
in the 16-year history
of the Festival.
I'd especially like to acknowledge
Festival organizers, Guy, Sue,
Jean and Maureen, please stand up.
[ Applause ]
My first meeting right after
the swearing in was a briefing
on the Book Festival, and I felt
like I was at the Command Center.
[laughter] It was something
and it was filmed by CNN,
so you might see it this weekend.
The beautiful image you see
behind me is our Festival poster,
it was designed by Uko Sumizu
[Assumed Spelling] and she wanted
to convey the idea that books take
us on journeys, they open up a world
of possibilities, they
make us ask questions
and encourage us to
look for answers.
They are essential to
the human experience.
And I remember my parents giving
me books when I was a little girl
and I remember vividly the moment
when I realized those symbols
on a page were words, words
that translated into ideas
and stories, and I was hooked.
Reading and a love of reading
literally changed my life.
And, as Frederick Douglas
said, once you learn
to read you will be forever free,
you will be free to explore,
to dream and make your own history.
Our wonderful Festival Co-Chairman,
the patriotic philanthropist,
David Rubenstein, was also
touched by the power of books.
When he was growing up in
Baltimore his dad would send him
to the Enoch Pratt Free Library.
I know a little something
about that place.
Where he would check out the maximum
number of books allowed each week,
12, he finished before
the week was out.
And he has said that the ability to
read and the love of reading, quote,
got me where I am today, and
he has called reading one
of the joys of my life.
And, David, I do second
that emotion.
But celebrating reading,
as he has enabled us to do
with his extraordinary support
of the National Book Festival,
is only a part of his mission.
He's also troubled, as many of us
are, by the persistent struggles
in our country and around
the world with illiteracy.
His dedication to make
sure every child
and adult shares the opportunity
and experience of reading moved him
to establish and support The
Library of Congress Literacy Awards.
The awards recognize organizations
that have made outstanding
contributions to improve literacy,
encourage the continuing
development of innovative methods
for combatting illiteracy, and
support the wide dissemination
of the most effective practices.
By recognizing current achievements
the awards seek to inspire others,
organizations, foundations and
other private sector groups
to become involved in
battling illiteracy.
In a few short years those awards
have provided more than $1 million
to support dozens of organizations,
both in the United
States and the world.
I think there's a video.
[laughter]
[ Video ]
>> Here at The Library of
Congress it's our mission
to provide the American people with
a rich, diverse, enduring source
of knowledge and the ability
to read and write is critical
to fulfilling that mission.
It's why we support the
thousands of organizations
around the world working to promote
literacy, advocating for change,
and empowering families, adults and
children to learn to read and write.
Literacy offers so many
life-enhancing benefits.
People who can read and do read are
healthier, happier and live longer.
They are more likely to
get preventative healthcare
and less likely to go
to an emergency room.
Globally women and girls who
are educated have fewer children
and those that they do have
are twice as likely to survive.
Everyone benefits from literacy.
For every 1% increase in a country's
literacy rate there's a permanent
1.5% increase in their
gross domestic product.
David M. Rubenstein's
creative vision
and generosity support The Library
of Congress Literacy Awards.
Each year the Literacy Awards
program recognizes some
of the most innovative and effective
organizations promoting literacy
in the United States
and around the world.
Through these awards we
celebrate literacy organizations
and the dedicated people
who through passion
and hard work are bringing
education and literacy
to an unprecedented number
of people around the globe.
We hope to inspire others to emulate
these groups and to do their part
to help end illiteracy in their
own communities and beyond.
We still have a long way to go,
together we're making
tremendous progress.
[ Applause ]
[ Music ]
Please join us in recognizing
the winners of the 2016 Library
of Congress Literacy Awards.
American prizewinner,
Parent-Child Home Program.
International prizewinner,
Libraries Without Borders.
David M. Rubenstein
prizewinner, WETA Reading Rockets.
We are grateful to David M.
Rubenstein for his vision
and commitment to literacy in
America and throughout the world.
More than 60 organizations have been
recognized by the program and more
than 25 million people have been
served by those organizations.
[ Applause ]
>> Ladies and gentlemen, please
welcome David M. Rubenstein,
Co-Chairman of the National Book
Festival and the creator and sponsor
of The Library of Congress
Literacy Awards.
>> David Rubenstein:
Thank you very much.
My mother did not make that movie.
I want to just express on behalf
of all Americans our delight
that Carla Hayden is now
the Librarian of Congress.
[ Applause ]
Obviously, we've had a lot of
great Librarians of Congress,
but somehow we've never had a
woman be Librarian of Congress,
we've never had a person of
color be a Librarian of Congress,
and now we have a perfect
combination.
So I think it's long
overdue, and we have a person
who is extraordinarily
interested in books.
She has also some other features
that I can't resist mentioning.
She came from Baltimore,
where I'm from.
[applause] She was head of
the Enoch Pratt Library,
which gave me my first library card.
[applause] She has a graduate degree
from the University
of Chicago, as do I.
And she loves to read books
and encourage other people
to read books, and no quality
could be more important
in a Librarian of Congress.
So, Carla, we're very much
indebted to you for taking this job
at a salary decrease from
what you had in Baltimore,
but public service is very
important and you will be rewarded
in Heaven no doubt
for having done this.
[applause] I realize
all of you came to hear
about the National Book
Festival, and it's spectacular,
it's an incredible event.
It was conceived of 16 years ago
really with an idea that Laura Bush
at the inaugural events asked Jim
Billington, then the Librarian
of Congress, if you have a National
Book Festival, she had one in Texas,
and he said, no, but we'll get one.
And Laura Bush and
he put it together.
It's now an incredible
event with more
than 100,000 people will be there
tomorrow, more than 125 authors.
Maria has lined up
spectacular groups
of authors, many of you are here.
Just as an American I want to thank
you for taking the time to come here
because you can't imagine
how many people are delighted
to meet the authors, to hear
them read from their books,
to have questions of them and
to get autographs from them.
It's a spectacular event, and as
the Librarian said, it's free.
And so it's going to
be a great event.
For those who haven't been there
yet you will never
really forget this event.
We normally go right into to have
some authors and you'll hear them
in a moment, but we just thought
tonight it would be a good idea just
to remind all of you who love books,
and everybody here loves books
and loves reading books
and loves making certain
that other people are encouraged to
read books, that we are a majority
but not as much a majority
as we should be.
It's hard to believe this,
but roughly 14% of Americans
in our country, the richest
country in the world, cannot read,
they're illiterate,
functionally illiterate.
Maybe they can read a stop sign,
maybe they can sign
their name a bit,
but they can't really read
past the third grade level.
That's 14% of Americans,
one-seventh of Americans.
If you are illiterate you have a
very modest chance of enjoying life.
So many people who cannot read earn
much less, on average about 40% less
than people who are literate,
but there are other problems.
If you cannot read you have a
much greater chance of going
into our criminal justice system,
85% of juvenile delinquents are
illiterate and roughly two-thirds
of all the people in
our federal prisons
and state prisons are illiterate.
So, obviously, if you cannot
read it is a big disadvantage
in our country's ability to
give people the joy of living
that they should get and
live up to all the freedoms
that this country is
supposed to be about.
So it's a sad situation, but there's
another situation that's just
as important to me, and that's
something called aliteracy,
which means people who can
read but choose not to do so.
This is hard to believe, but
roughly 30% of people who graduate
from college never read
another book, hard to believe.
And it's also hard to believe, but
it's also true, that roughly 50%
of Americans have not
been in a bookstore
or bought a book in
the last five years.
Also hard to believe that roughly
25% of Americans, all Americans,
have not read a book
in the last year.
Now this is sad because all of us
know that the pleasure of books is
that it brings you in a different
world, it can take you as it did
for me from a modest background into
somebody who really enjoys books,
can meet people all over the world,
and can have a much richer life.
So as tomorrow you are at
the National Book Festival
and as you hear the authors tonight
I'd just like everybody to think
for a moment what can you do to help
improve literacy in this country,
illiteracy and aliteracy?
So just think about it, in addition
to writing books, reading books
and encouraging people to do so,
just think about what event
you could be involved with
or what organization you
could be involved with?
So the organizations that are going
to be honored tonight are terrific
organizations and I appreciate all
of them coming here this evening,
but they are really just
representing a small section
of the people doing
outstanding work.
They did outstanding work and
we're going to recognize them,
but we should all realize that all
of these organizations need
additional financial support,
they need your help, your ideas,
and really if you take anything away
from this evening and tomorrow it is
that while books are wonderful
we need to encourage people
to learn how to read books and
also once they learn how to read
to actually read the books.
So tonight you're going to have an
enjoyable evening, but first we'd
like to give out the awards to the
people who have won these awards,
so why don't we begin to do so,
and I would ask the Librarian
of Congress if she
would come up here.
Carla? Okay, ready?
>> Ladies and gentlemen, here
to receive the award on behalf
of America prizewinner,
Parent-Child Home Program,
is Sarah Walter [Assumed Spelling].
[ Applause ]
Here to receive the award on behalf
of International prizewinner,
Libraries Without Borders, is
Allister Chang [Assumed Spelling].
[ Applause ]
Here to receive the award on
behalf of Rubenstein prizewinner,
WETA Reading Rockets, is Sharon
Percy Rockefeller, President and CEO
of WETA, and Noel Gunther.
[ Applause ]
The check is in the mail and
they'll get the money soon.
[laughter]
>> Carla Hayden: It's very
hard to surprise someone
like Mr. Rubenstein, as you can
imagine, but hold on for a minute.
Because you have been so generous
- and he's like what is she doing?
This is really fun.
You have been so generous to
the Library, to the nation,
and to so many people, we
thought we'd surprise you
with a special something,
given by a special person.
Guess who this might be given by?
One of our honored authors
is Mr. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar,
who is a Professor, too, in his
way and he's just wonderful,
and he has a special
presentation for you.
>> David Rubenstein: Wow.
Okay.
[ Applause ]
>> Carla Hayden: You could imagine
what went into the planning of this.
So way to go, David.
Thank you so much.
>> David Rubenstein:
Thank you very much.
I'm the Chairman of the
Board at Duke University
and we never could beat
UCLA when Kareem was there.
[laughter] I didn't play at Duke
because to dunk the ball
I told them they had
to lower it to about six feet.
And, anyway, thank
you all very much.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome novelist
and memoirist, Edwidge Danticat.
[ Applause ]
>> Edwidge Danticat:
Good evening, bonsoir,
and congratulations
to the award winners.
What an incredible honor it is to
be here with all of you tonight.
Being at one of the first events
being hosted by our new Librarian
of Congress, Ms. Carla
Hayden, is phenomenal.
[applause] It's also wonderful
to be here in Washington,
D.C. on the same weekend
that the National Museum
of African-American History and
Culture will be officially opened.
[applause] The ancestors must
be rejoicing just a little bit
about this weekend.
Speaking of ancestors, I'm glad
that tonight's theme links journeys
and literacy because it gives me an
opportunity to kick off with a line
from our Librarian of Congress
at her swearing in ceremony.
Ms. Hayden, you said, people of my
race were once punished with lashes
and worse for learning to read.
My people, too, and this is why
I often call myself an accident
of literacy.
I am an accident of literacy because
I risked not existing at all.
My parents grew up during the
father-son Duvalier dictatorship
in Haiti, which lasted from
the 1950s to the 1980s.
The first 12 years of my
life were spent living
under that dictatorship.
Growing up in Haiti I knew many
children who had a parent killed,
sometimes a father,
before they were born.
This often took away the possibility
of their being able to go to school
and getting an education.
I am an accident of literacy
because I might not have been able
to attend school at all had
my parents not journeyed here
to the US, like thousands
of immigrants,
some of whom are being
deported today.
Parents who have no choice
but to leave their countries,
their families and even their
children behind for the possibility
of a better life elsewhere.
I am an accident of literacy
because it is the money earned
from my parents working
sometimes two jobs,
sometimes around the clock,
in New York sweatshops,
factories, kitchens and carwashes.
Their salaries from these jobs
paid for me to start on my journey
to learning to read and write.
I am an accident of literacy
because when I was able
to join my parents here in
the United States at age 12
if we were undocumented I might have
been shut-out of the public schools
that eventually allowed me
to learn English and put me
on a path towards reading and
writing in my adopted tongue.
I am an accident of literacy
because some libraries might
have refused me entry or access
or a library card, they might
have put up a wall between me
and those hundreds and hundreds of
books that I didn't know I needed,
wanted, to help me
imagine a better journey
and a life beyond the barred windows
of my family's crammed
two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn.
I am an accident of literacy
because even though I was new
to the United States
and new to English some
of my teachers refrained from
telling me that certain words,
thoughts, ideas and dreams
were unavailable to me.
I am an accident of literacy
because all those things
that could have happened to me did
not, in part because of struggles
that others have fought and
continue to fight today.
I always tell people when they ask
who my best writing teachers were
that they were the
storytellers of my childhood.
My grandmothers and aunts
who were not all readers,
some of them were not even
literate, but they carried stories
like treasures inside of them.
And every once in awhile on a dark
night when the lights were out
or even when they were on
they would tell me stories
because there were some things that
they did not want me to forget.
They did not want me to forget what
it is like to laugh, to be afraid,
to feel sadness and to feel joy,
all sometimes within the
scope of a single story.
To these great storytellers,
Griots, Lechoneras,
Loniceras [Assumed Spelling], every
story was a gift that you carried
with you until it was
your turn to pass it on.
And even if you did not understand
the story fully as it was being told
to you one day it would become
clearer when some event would show
up in your life when you would
need a story, most on your path,
on your journey, and that story
would appear again like an ancestor
or an heir, someone yet to be born.
Which is why this wonderful
celebration
of literacy also makes me think
of so many, both here in the US
as Mr. Rubenstein said
and around the world,
for whom literacy is still beyond
reach, either for political
or socioeconomic reasons many
are not allowed to read and write
or can afford to learn
to read and write.
Theirs is one of the shadows
that dims some of our joy
as we celebrate literacy and the
individuals, writers, librarians
and institutions, like this one,
that nurtures and supports literacy.
As Richard Wright wrote in
his 1945 memoir, Black Boy,
after borrowing a white
man's library card
and forging his handwriting so he
could borrow books from the library,
Wright wrote that, quote, reading
can be a passion, a hunger too great
to be contained, words can also be
used as weapons or counter weapons,
words help us experience the depths
of what is possible
for us and others.
Which is why literacy is so often
closely monitored, suppressed
or forbidden by oppressors, bigots,
dictators, tyrants and their like.
And maybe this is why our ancestors
might be a little bit pleased
tonight and this entire weekend
because not only are we celebrating
reading and writing, literacy
and the word, but we are
also celebrating some,
like our wonderful new
Librarian of Congress,
who have become living
stories, as well.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome science
writer, James Gleick.
[ Applause ]
>> James Gleick: Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm so happy to be here.
I'm honored to be here,
especially at the very beginning
of what's going to be
called the Hayden era.
I've just been working on a book
about time travel for awhile,
and when I told people
I was working on a book
about time travel I got all
kinds of different reactions.
But I think my favorite
was a woman who said,
cool, have you ever done it?
[laughter] And I have a feeling that
she was disappointed by my answer.
Because, of course, nobody
actually gets to hop into a DeLorean
and speed into the past and
meet our parents as teenagers.
We can't plunk ourselves down
in the saddle of a time machine
and turn the lever that
sends us to the 31st Century.
Much as we might want to meet them
there aren't actually time travelers
from the future walking
in our midst.
Still nowadays time machines
are a great cultural totem.
The Time Machine is a
well-known movie, actually,
a whole slew of movies and TV shows
and comics and everything else,
but of course first
and foremost before all
of that The Time Machine is a book.
It was a little book.
The American edition was sold
in New York by the publisher,
Henry Holt, for 75 cents.
Eventually, the young man
who wrote it, H.G. Wells,
became an international celebrity,
a historian, a visionary,
champion of world government.
But in 1895 he was just a son of
shopkeepers, fresh out of school,
desperately hoping to
make a living as a writer.
He wrote The Time Machine and
rewrote it again and again,
working late at night by the
light of a paraffin lamp,
and finally found a publisher
who paid him 100 Pounds for it.
It wasn't easy to make a
career out of writing books
in Victorian England,
but it was possible.
Wells wrote to a friend,
someday I shall succeed,
I really believe, but
it is a weary game.
In 21st Century American it's
possible to make a career
out of writing books, but it isn't
easy, and forces of technology
and commerce are combining
to make it harder every
year for young writers.
I think we all know that
our commitment to literacy
and our commitment to
the writing life have
to be inseparable, one in the same.
I have time traveled, by the way.
[laughter] And so have you
all, readers and writers.
There was a massacre in Haiti
in 1937, all but forgotten.
Edwidge Danticat takes us there.
[applause] In 1914
Theodore Roosevelt hauled
and paddled dugout canoes
down the River of Doubt
in the Amazon Rain Forest.
Candice Millard takes us there.
[applause] We can leave
our busy electric present
and turn the clock back 60
years to a small Iowa town
where a dying pastor is preserving
his memories and reconnecting
with his own past and the clock
turner is Marilynne Robinson.
[applause] And, of course, a lot
of writers aren't busy
recreating the past,
instead they're trying
to invent the future.
Our best sense of the future
and maybe our worst sense,
the future we can hope for,
the future we should fear,
they both come from the
imaginations of writers.
You want to take a journey, we
are all time travelers nowadays,
and the book is our time machine.
And the Library is time
travel headquarters,
which I guess makes The Library of
Congress the time travel pentagon.
[laughter] And I mean that
in the nicest possible way.
The great Ursula K. Le Guin put it
this way, story is our only boat
for sailing on the river of time.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Ladies and gentlemen, please
welcome historian, Candice Millard.
[ Applause ]
>> Candice Millard: Thank you.
I can't tell you what an incredible
honor it is for me to be here among
so many distinguished authors, and I
had just the unbelievable privilege
of meeting Dr. Hayden earlier
tonight and I will never forget it.
So thank you so much for
allowing me to be here.
I grew up in a small town in Ohio
and it was a great place to grow up,
it was safe, the people were
nice, there were a lot of woods
and streams and ponds that
froze over in the winter
so we could skate on them.
But if I look back at my childhood
the happiest moments I had were
spent in the library, and
it was a great library.
It was in this old
two-story red brick building
with wide front steps.
It had a small room in the
front for children's books.
It had high ceilings
and creaky wood floors,
and it smelled like old books.
If it was a nice day or even a
cold one I used to sit outside
on the front steps and I would
dangle my legs over the side
and I would feel the sun on my
face, and I would read the books
that I had just picked out and I was
never happier than in those moments.
Then one day when I was about nine
years old I went to the library.
You could walk there from my house.
And I saw this small vertical
revolving rack of paperback books,
and there was this handwritten
paper sign on top of them
with just one word
and it said, free.
And we had always had books in
my house because we always went
to the library, but I didn't have
very many books that were mine,
that actually belonged to me.
So I stood in front of that
revolving rack and I turned it
and I turned it around and around.
And these weren't children's books,
so I didn't know any of them,
but one finally caught
my eye and it was called,
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
And, again, I was just this kid
from this little working class town
in Ohio, so I had never
heard of this book,
I had no idea what it was about, I
had no idea who Maya Angelou was.
I just liked the title and the
cover, so I pulled it off the rack
and I slipped it in my
pocket and I brought it home.
And I didn't know it at the time,
but that walk, that small journey
from the library back to my
house, past the hardware store
and the elementary
school and J.B.'s ruista,
stopped to get deep-fried
mushrooms -
that walk I had made a thousand
times before would be different
this time.
Because I began to read, I
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Of course, at nine a lot
of it confused me and some
of it scared me, but for
the first time I realized
that books could be more than
just entertaining or educational,
they could be beautiful
and they could be moving,
and they cannot just teach
me, they could transport me.
As I grew older books became not
less important to me, but even more.
I turned to books when I went
to Ethiopia on assignment
for National Geographic for the
first time, and I was scared.
I wasn't scared because I was
in Ethiopia, I loved it there.
I was scared because I was new
at this, this was my big chance,
and I knew that I was
going to mess up.
So every night, tired and worried,
I would climb into my sleeping bag
under my mosquito net and
I would reach for my book.
And instantly I would
be in another world,
a world in which whatever
happened it wasn't my fault,
and I didn't have to worry
about it the next day,
I could just be whisked away.
I also turned to books when
my husband and I had a child
who was born with cancer, and
every night in the hospital
when she fell asleep I would sit in
a corner of her room with a bottle
of water and some beef jerky
from the vending machine
and a little book light and Harry
Potter, and in a flash I would be
in Hogwarts, far away from
all the tears of the day.
So all that I can hope from
the books that I write is
that they might be a comfort to
someone, somewhere at some time.
I know that there are
people who think the idea
of a book being your
friend is ridiculous,
but I think that there is
absolutely nothing wrong with that.
On the contrary, I
think it's a shame not
to have books that are your friends.
And when I think of literacy,
when I think of what it must mean
to not be able to read, I think
that it is a deprivation not just
of knowledge, enlightenment and
opportunity, although it is all
of those things, but it also
denies a powerful source
of refuge and friendship.
Winston Churchill, who was
not only a voracious reader
but an extraordinarily talented
writer who supported himself
for 70 years with his writing, who
won the Nobel Prize for Literature,
said that if you cannot read all
of your books, at any rate peer
into them, let them fall
open where they will,
read from the first sentence
that arrests the eye,
set them back on their
shelves with your own hands,
arrange them on your own plan, so
that if you do not know what is
in them you will at least know where
they are, let them be your friends.
I still have my first copy of I
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
I brought it with me tonight, and
it's come on a long journey with me
over many decades and to many
places, and it will always be one
of my most treasured possessions,
but more than that it
will always be my friend.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Ladies and gentlemen, please
welcome novelist and winner
of the 2016 Library
of Congress prize
for American Fiction,
Marilynne Robinson.
[ Applause ]
>> Marilynne Robinson: Good evening.
It's a wonderful honor to be here.
Sometimes, you know, this
building is a celebration,
much more than a monument.
And to be included in an event of
this kind and to be among the people
that sustain it and love it
is a very, very moving thing.
I've taught writing for a
long time to gifted writers,
who enriched my life for many years
with their brilliance and grace.
And while I taught I talked
about experiences of my own
that made me feel the importance,
the qualitative significance
of reading.
These are some, a couple
of not quite anecdotes
that I often mentioned
with my students.
In any case, I remember
quite distinctly what it was
like when the difficulties
of my new literacy,
my marginal literacy somehow
became the utter trance
of childhood bookishness, when the
resistance offered by unknown words
and complicated sentences
fell away before my absorption
in almost any book that
fell into my hands.
When children love books
the experience they find
in them is unsought and
engrossing like a dream.
I realize how important it is
to me now to have been haunted
and enchanted by Edgar Allan Poe,
to have laughed myself to tears
over the lesser works of Mark Twain,
to have been given
the collected poems
of Emily Dickinson
by my big brother.
The sense of progressive
initiation has been part of it all
through my whole life, together
with an impulse and desire to speak
into that great conversation.
An experience like this
has been the privilege
of very few people historically,
very few human beings.
It waited on the technologies
of printing and publishing,
on public libraries, and on the
historically recent assumption
that literacy should
be the norm in society.
Now it is hard to remember that
it is individually an achievement
and collectively a privilege, and
that the modern world is unique
in the extraordinary degree
that it is structured by
and permeated by written language.
We tend to think of things that
are fruitful, as if they are
to be valued for their utility.
We forget how objectively
wonderful they are.
I have had a few opportunities
to speak with people who are
or who have been incarcerated.
Typically, they have come
to reading late or at least
from marginal literacy
to actual literacy,
for reasons that are
familiar to all of us.
They have been brought to
books by boredom and loneliness
and restlessness with the
thought that they are excluded
from knowledge of another life.
One man told me that he had
been drifting from bad to worse
and then I read a book, he said,
that was the first time I realized
that the world was something
I could be interested in.
The fruitfulness I've spoke of
is the change in this man's life,
in his mind, without reference to
potential contributions to society,
which might very well be modest
as these things are
conventionally reckoned.
Anyone who remembers being struck
and moved by a book knows something
of his experience and knows that
it is an excellent thing in itself,
a real liberation, without any
reference to practical consequences.
I mention these conversations
because they have made me
particularly aware of what we,
as a community, give
people or deny them
when we make them fully
literate or leave them in a state
of exclusion most of
us cannot imagine.
They remind me, also, that the
written word is unaccountably rich
and powerful, efficacious in
the manner of food and drink
and the light of the sun.
And here we are at the wealthiest
country in history wondering darkly
about the wisdom of our
investment in the humanities.
Will our children enhance a
corporate profit margin as a result
of reading, even studying
leaves of grass?
Quite possibly.
[laughter] I think the question
being mulled really is whether we
should invest so much social
wealth in providing a great part
of our population with an
acquaintance, at least,
with their human heritage.
Stinginess creeps, it finds
its own logic irrefutable.
Increasingly public assets are
spoken of as public burdens.
Why after all lock-up
so much exploitable
wealth in national parks?
Do we really need all
these great universities?
We, the public, could be
impoverished radically before we
understood the nature of the loss.
An incarcerated woman said
to me, tell your students
to write good books,
they're all we live for.
What would it matter if that
sustenance were denied to her?
Who would even know?
This is a metaphysical question,
so is the disputed value
of the astonishing communion we have
among ourselves mediated by books.
How we value her solitary
obscure human life,
how much wealth we are honored to
share with her, will speak directly
to the kind of civilization
we are and will become.
This great Library is the proof of
the value our society has placed
in the world civilization of
readers, writers and books.
I cannot begin to reckon
the pure good I have taken
from American fiction, American
libraries, American education.
This prize that I will receive
is profoundly gratifying to me.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Carla Hayden: Thank you.
Thank you to all of our
inspirational authors,
members of Congress and sponsors.
To those of you watching at home
I hope you will join us tomorrow
at the Convention Center or
tune in to C-SPAN Book TV
or PBS View Book View Now,
who will be broadcasting live
from the National Book Festival.
And I will be tweeting
the entire day.
[laughter]
[ Applause ]
And now would you please
join me in the Great Hall
for a buffet supper
and enjoy the Festival.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation
of The Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.
