Chapter 5 5. The library is not a treasure building

The General Assembly has a large library, and each department also has its own library, which was rare during the war.All libraries are open, and students are free to enter the stacks, read whatever books they want, and no one cares about them for a whole day.Some books have good titles and they are taken out to look through them. If they find it boring, they are put back. Some books are very interesting and they are borrowed. It is like soaking in the ocean of books. The enjoyment is really wonderful.After liberation, I worked in the Institute of History for 30 years. As a researcher, I was not allowed to enter the library. If I wanted to read a book, I had to fill in a slip outside and hand it over to the librarian.Once I discussed with the person in charge of the library. I only searched for one material, but I didn’t know which book it was in. You let me go in and look it up, so I don’t have to fill in notes and change books. It’s too troublesome.In fact, I was quite old at that time, in my fifties, and he "gracefully" allowed me to go in to check the books. He also took a flashlight and stared at the back of my buttocks, as if he was afraid that I would steal books inside or cause damage.This kind of surveillance made me feel extremely awkward and uncomfortable.The current National Library has the same problem.Many libraries cannot be stored in the warehouse, so please fill in the slips outside first, and you are limited to borrowing three copies. Maybe you will only find one copy for you, and looking through it may not be what you want.Well, this half-day is tantamount to wasting time blindly. After reading a useless book, the time is wasted.

I met a Chinese American, Ju Mi, at the Library of Congress. She is the daughter of Ju Zheng, a veteran of the Kuomintang and President of the Judicial Yuan.She said that when she went to Nanjing to find materials, it was extremely troublesome to borrow books, and it was even more troublesome to borrow archives. As a result, she stayed for seven months, and what she saw was not worth reading in an American library for a month.I feel the same way.Our procedures are too troublesome. If you can enter the library at will, just like visiting a bookstore, turn left and right, how much can you read in a day?Although not all books are carefully read, but the amount of information is very large, you can read whichever book you need.If you can't enter the library, you have to fill in a note and ask him to get it for you. How many books can you read in a day?I think it has something to do with our guiding philosophy.What is the role of the library?We should try our best to let everyone see the book.But according to our current point of view, books are the wealth of the country, and we should try our best to protect them.Therefore, we try our best to let people read as little as possible, or not to let people read, which invisibly makes our country lag behind in absorbing knowledge.Libraries are established to disseminate knowledge. The focus should not be on how many tall buildings to build and how many books to collect, but how to circulate these books and maximize their effectiveness.If this point is not taken into account, the library will become a treasure building, lest it will be damaged by others, and this will lose its original meaning.

When I first went to America, what impressed me the most was their library.It stands to reason that I am a foreigner, and I don't have a letter of introduction, and I don't have any documents, but no one asks questions, and I can still enter the library.The library is open from early morning to midnight. As long as you have the energy, you can work from morning to night, and its conditions are very good. There are sofas inside and a snack bar next to it. If you are tired or hungry, you can rest for a while before continuing. How much do you gain?And there are almost all the books about China in it, including books from Hong Kong and Taiwan, books published in mainland China, newspapers, and magazines.But what about us?I can't read foreign books, and I can't read books from Hong Kong and Taiwan.When I was at the Institute of History, I had to write an application for special approval from the party committee to borrow a journal from Taiwan's "Academia Sinica". Who wants to go to that trouble?This means that we are self-enclosed in thought.You don’t look at other people’s games, you just look at yourself behind closed doors. It’s like a football team practicing behind closed doors all day. You don’t know how they play. Can this kind of team win when they go out?Since socialism is inherently superior to capitalism in theory, it is not afraid of you, why are you afraid of him?

At that time, we had several ways to improve our English. One was to go to the library of the Department of Foreign Languages ​​to borrow English novels.I remember a classmate asked me: "How many books have you read?" I said I read 20 books, and he said: "20 books are not enough, we need 30 books." Later we discovered that when reading English novels, you should not read English and American novels. It depends on the works of other countries translated into English, such as the works of the French Dumas, Dumas fils, and Maupassant, or the works of the Russians Tolstoy and Turgenev. It is easy to get those works translated into English. many.Another way is to read English magazines.There is a magazine reading room in the General Assembly. There are always two to three hundred kinds of periodicals and magazines at home and abroad. If you have nothing to do, you can browse in it. It is like visiting a bookstore, and you can absorb a lot of things.Among them, I am interested, and I still remember them clearly, such as Apollo, which is about art history, and the illustrations in it are very wonderful-in fact, there are no professional courses in art history in school, but there are also magazines in the reading room of that kind.There is also a magazine called Etude, which is a French music history magazine, introducing a lot of classical music.I was very impressed by an article about Schubert's song Erlknig (), which is a German folk legend.A child was very ill, and his father carried him to the doctor on horseback. When the wind was blowing hard at night, a demon king suddenly appeared to seduce the child, and the child died later.I knew this song when I was in Beijing. It was a poem by Goethe, but I couldn’t find it. When I saw it in the magazine, I quickly copied it.These conditions were never enjoyed again.I have been at the Institute of History for so many years, and the brand is also "Chinese Academy of Sciences". It stands to reason that the conditions should be very rich, but the result is not as good as when it was at the United Nations University.

At that time, the British Consulate was not far from the school, and the reading room in the consulate was free to enter. Usually there were only three or four readers, and the people in the reading room were very attentive and would even pour you a cup of tea. In the autumn of 1939, just two days before I left Guiyang, Hitler attacked Poland, and World War II began.There were various English-language newspapers and magazines in the British Consulate. At that time we were also very concerned about the situation of the war and often went to read them.There is a London Illustrated News ("London Illustrated") reporting on the battle situation, with many photos. In June 1940, France surrendered, Hitler occupied Paris, and de Gaulle went to England to continue fighting, called "Free France" (later called "Fighting France").In fact, de Gaulle's status in France is not very high. He was originally a director-level figure in the Ministry of War. However, he is famous for proposing a new tactical concept. He believes that future operations will mainly be mechanized mobile warfare, rather than trench warfare like World War I. , Dig a deep ditch, and have machine guns to guard the enemy so they can't get through.During World War II, tanks were used on a large scale and could run around, so they fought mobile warfare.After Germany defeated France, there was a "Sea Lion Project" to prepare to attack Britain across the sea. First, there was a large-scale bombing, with thousands of planes flying every day. The bombing continued for three months. Residents of London lived in the subway. Those situations " It was in the Illustrated London Gazette, with photographs and drawings.At that time, Britain only had 800 fighter jets, far less than Germany in number, but they were all the most advanced at that time, a spitfire and a hurricane, with excellent performance.Moreover, Britain also has a secret weapon, radar, which played a very important role in the "Battle of Great Britain", so Germany finally failed to cross the sea.These are what I saw in the reading room of the consulate. On the one hand, I have increased my practical knowledge. On the other hand, I have unconsciously absorbed the practical English of many modern newspapers and periodicals.