If some of us were randomly asked to name a place where prolonged silence prevailed several would no doubt come up with the word ‘library’. However, just to prove that everything is relative, if some of us in Australia were randomly asked to name a place where the sound of wailing babies can be heard for hours on end, several of us would no doubt come up with the word ‘library’.

It’s true. Either the concept of a library being a hallowed precinct of silence has undergone a rapid evolution or, as they say, they do things differently Down Under. I have membership at three council libraries here in Sydney and you better believe it when I say that I find it hard to rank them in order of deafening noise.

Someone once said that the only sounds you should ever hear in a library — and that too only if you listen very, very keenly — are the muted beckonings of a thousand ideas by a thousand authors encased in pages on the bookshelves, begging to be read. Nothing more, nothing less. I worked in a school in India which had one of the best collections of books a school library could be proud of. And a librarian – Miss Parvathy – who in another life was probably a five-star general in the army, so capably did she control the hordes of pupils traipsing through the doors daily.

I clearly remember, one minute an entire class of pupils walking in a ragged line towards the library doors, chattering their heads off. But the moment they arrived in the ‘hallowed portal’ and encountered Miss Parvathy waiting at the door, a silence descended everywhere, tongues were stilled, struck dumb for the next 40 minutes. Even gum chewing pupils shifted the gum to a corner of the cheek and waited.

Masticating was not only frowned upon, it invited a punishment – the pupil had to give up his chair and the comfort of sitting and reading and take his book to a corner of the room to stand and read, resting the book on the ledge of a window. And if you thought you could masticate discreetly you were mistaken for Miss Parvathy was a keen purveyor of jaw movement. The merest hint that one was imitating a ruminating cow and chewing the cud, a silent hand on the shoulder was all that one felt before the eyes directed the ‘cud chewer’ to his corner of the room.

Perhaps that is an extreme, I agree. But whenever I go into any of the three libraries over here in Sydney, I wish fervently for those extremes to return, for another Miss Parvathy to materialise out of the ether and take over the administration.

Missing the quiet

Try as I might, I cannot imagine why a creche must be attached to a library. Someone is going to suffer discomfort and it is the reader most likely. I don’t see the point in offering reading and research services but not providing the quiet in which to carry out one’s tasks. It’s unfair to ask babies to stop crying.

Oftentimes, it’s not the babies but the minders who, when a baby is in full-cry mode, try to find a placating sound even louder than the baby’s wails, in the hope that eventually a peace will be attained. This tactic, as readers would sense, is erroneous for it only encourages the baby to scream louder. And so, in the ever increasing decibel environment one sits trying to assimilate a passage on Alexander Pope and wonder what he means by “Annual for me, the grape, the rose renew/The juice nectareous, and the balmy dew/For me, the mine a thousand treasures brings/For me, health gushes from a thousand springs/Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise/My foot-stool earth, my canopy the skies.”

There’s something beautiful in those lines if only I could get a sense of things through a myriad wails.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.