Libraries are under attack. Some seem to think that libraries are irrelevant and obsolete now that we have the internet, Amazon and streaming services. They believe taxpayers dollars should not be used for libraries that everyone should simply buy themselves what they need. Others see libraries as an idea that must be actively fought and attacked, precisely because libraries are open to everyone. They object to books, resources and programs that don't fit their political and religious beliefs and seek to ban them altogether. And others see libraries as something to be eradicated because everything must be profit driven and libraries provide so much (information, resources, entertainment...) for free. An incomprehensible, dangerous notion for those who only think of money and profit.
Federico Garcia Lorca, who was an incredibly brilliant Spanish writer and poet saw things a bit differently. As a writer, Lorca championed books, arts and culture. But it wasn't just because he was a writer. He saw and understood the changes that were taking place in Spain. The more people gained the ability to read, the more they learned. And the more they learned, the more progressive Spain was becoming.
To him, reading, arts, and culture informed people, developed their mind and brought light. They were building a public education system, they were building a consciousness and they were building a republic.
He was a man with a huge heart and deep humanity and, of course, when Franco led the fascist coup against the Spanish Republic, Lorca was a prime target. He was an outspoken socialist and he was also gay. Two things fascists cannot accept. So, Lorca was captured and executed August 18 1936. His body was never found.
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| Federico Garcia Lorga reading with his little sister |
In September 1931, four years before the fascist coup and five before his murder, the town of Fuente Vaqueros opened a public library. The first of its kind in the whole province of Granada and, of course, Lorca was there as this was his hometown.
He gave an impassioned speech that still feels highly relevant today. In the speech he reflects on the importance and value of books. He describes people who don't engage with any art, culture and reading as dead. People who go through life without really engaging with it. Then he says:
Humans can not live of bread alone. If I were hungry and helpless in the street, I would not ask for a loaf of bread, but I would ask for half a loaf of bread and a book. And I violently attack from here those who only talk about economic demands without ever mentioning the cultural demands that are what the people are crying out for. It is good that all people eat, but let’s ensure all people know.
Lorca said in the speech that he never had any books because he read them and, then, gave them away in the hope that others would also read and learn from them. And he added:
I feel much more sorry for a person who wants to know and cannot than for a hungry one. For a hungry person can easily satisfy their hunger with a piece of bread or some fruit, but a person who is eager to know and has no means suffers a terrible agony because they need books, books, many books, and… where are these books?
That's why opening that first library in the province, opening in his town and making books available to everyone for free, was so life changing and revolutionary. Lorca was sharply aware of it and in one part of the speech he talked about Dostoyevsky, who was imprisoned in Siberia, in deplorable conditions, away from everything and everyone. When he was asking for help in a letter to his distant family he asked for books. Nothing else. Lorca recounts:
"He was cold and did not ask for fire, he was terribly thirsty and did not ask for water: he asked for books. That is horizons, that is stairs to climb to the summit of the spirit and the heart. Because the physical, biological, natural agony of a body due to hunger, thirst or cold lasts a short time, very little, but the agony of the unsatisfied soul lasts a lifetime."
We take public libraries for granted now. But what a revolutionary idea they were. and what a treasure they are! We must use them, cherish them, champion them and protect them. Because, without them, large parts of our community would have no access to information, entertainment, culture, art, and resources. Without them, our community would be all the poorer in mind and spirit, and the authoritarians and fascists would assert their power over their masses.
Enough from me... I leave you with a translation of Lorca's speech (I cut a few lines here and there but not too much). A link to the full speech in Spanish is right at the bottom.
Dear fellow countrymen and friends:
All my lectures are always read, which means a lot more work than speaking, but in the end, the expression is much more lasting because it is written down and much more solid since it can serve as a lesson to people who do not hear or are not present here.
I owe a duty of gratitude to this beautiful town where I was born and where I spent my happy childhood for the undeserved tribute that I have received by giving my name to the old street of the church. You can all believe that I thank you from the bottom of my heart, and that when in Madrid or elsewhere I am asked where I was born, in newspaper surveys or anywhere else, I say that I was born in Fuente Vaqueros so that the glory or fame that falls on me also falls on this very nice, on this very modern, on this juicy and liberal town of Fuente.
The inhabitants of this town have a native artistic feeling that is very palpable in the people who have been born here. An artistic feeling and a sense of joy, which is the same as saying the sense of life.
I have visited hundreds and hundreds of small towns like this one, and I have been able to study in them a melancholy that is born not only from poverty, but also from hopelessness and lack of culture. People who live only attached to the land have only a terrible feeling of death without anything that raises them towards clear days of laughter and authentic social peace. Fuente Vaqueros has won that. Here there is a longing for joy, or rather for progress, or for life. And therefore an artistic desire, a love of beauty and culture.
I have seen lots of people from other fields come home from work, and, tired, they have sat still, like statues, waiting for another day and another and another, with the same rhythm, without a longing for knowledge passing through their souls. People who are slaves to death without even having glimpsed the light and beauty that the human spirit reaches.
Because in the world there is nothing but life and death and there are millions of people who talk, live, see, eat, but they are dead. Deader than stones and deader than the true dead who sleep their sleep under the earth, because their souls are dead. Dead like a mill that does not grind, dead because it has no love, nor a germ of an idea, nor a faith, nor a longing for liberation, essential for all people to be able to call themselves such. This is one of the issues, my dear friends, that most concerns me at the present time.
When someone goes to the theatre, to a concert, or to a party of any kind, if the party is to their liking, they immediately remember and regret that the people they love are not there. 'How my sister and my father would like this,' they think, and they no longer enjoy the spectacle except through a slight melancholy. This is the melancholy that I feel, not for the people in my house, which would be small minded and selfish, but for all the creatures who, for lack of means and through their own misfortune, do not enjoy the supreme good of beauty, which is life and goodness and serenity and passion.
That is why I never have a book, because I give away as many as I buy, which are infinite, and that is why I am here honoured and happy to inaugurate this town library, surely the first in the entire province of Granada.
Humans can not live of bread alone. If I were hungry and helpless in the street, I would not ask for a loaf of bread, but I would ask for half a loaf of bread and a book. And I violently attack from here those who only talk about economic demands without ever mentioning the cultural demands that are what the people are crying out for. It is good that all people eat, but let’s ensure all people know. Let them all enjoy the fruits of the human spirit because to do otherwise is to turn them into machines at the service of the State, it is to turn them into slaves of a terrible social organisation.
I feel much more sorry for a person who wants to know and cannot than for a hungry one. For a hungry person can easily satisfy their hunger with a piece of bread or some fruit, but a person who is eager to know and has no means suffers a terrible agony because they need books, books, many books, and… where are these books?
Books! Books! Here is a magic word that is equivalent to saying: 'love, love', and that people should ask for as they ask for bread or as they long for rain for their crops.
When the famous Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, father of the Russian revolution much more than Lenin, was imprisoned in Siberia, far from the world, between four walls and surrounded by desolate plains of endless snow, and asked for help in a letter to his distant family, he only said: 'Send me books, books, many books so that my soul does not die!'
He was cold and did not ask for fire, he was terribly thirsty and did not ask for water: he asked for books. That is horizons, that is stairs to climb to the summit of the spirit and the heart. Because the physical, biological, natural agony of a body due to hunger, thirst or cold lasts a short time, very little, but the agony of the unsatisfied soul lasts a lifetime.
The great Menéndez Pidal, one of the most true sages in Europe, has already said that the motto of the Republic must be: 'Culture'. Culture because only through it can the problems of today's people, full of faith but lacking in light, be resolved.
That is why you cannot imagine how happy I am to be able to inaugurate the public library of Fuente Vaqueros! A library that is a collection of books grouped and selected, that is a voice against ignorance; a perennial light against darkness.
No one realises when they have a book in their hands the effort, the pain, the vigil, the blood it has cost. The book is without a doubt the greatest work of humanity. Many times, people are asleep like the water of a pond on a windless day. Not even the slightest tremor disturbs the soft tenderness of the water. The frogs sleep at the bottom and the birds are motionless on the branches that surround it. But, suddenly, throw a stone and you will see an explosion of concentric circles, of round waves that expand, running over each other and crashing against the edges. You will see a total shudder of the water, a bustle of frogs in all directions, a restlessness on all the banks and even the birds that slept on the shady branches jump off in flocks throughout the blue air. Many times, people sleep like the water of a pond on a windless day, and a book or some books can shake them and disturb them and show them new horizons of betterment and harmony.
And how much effort it has cost a person to produce a book! And what a great influence they have, have had and will have on the world!
In the materials of nature there are, no doubt, the palliatives for many incurable diseases, but what combination is the right one for the miracle to work? Rarely in the history of the world has there been a more important event than the invention of the printing press. Of much greater scope than the other two great events of its time: the invention of gunpowder and the discovery of America. For if gunpowder put an end to feudalism and gave rise to great armies and to the formation of strong nationalities previously divided by the nobility, and the birth of America gave rise to a displacement of history to a new life and ended a thousand-year-old geographical secret, the printing press will cause a revolution in souls, so great that societies will tremble to their foundations.
And yet, how silently and timidly is it born! While gunpowder was exploding its fiery roses across the fields, and the Atlantic was filling with ships with sails filled by the wind, coming and going loaded with gold and precious materials, quietly in the city of Antwerp, Christopher Plantin established the most important printing press and bookstore in the world, and finally, he made the first cheap books.
So the old books, of which there were only one or two or three copies left, piled up at the doors of the printing presses and at the doors of the houses of the learned, clamouring to be published, to be translated, to be spread over the whole surface of the earth. This is the great moment of the world. It is the Renaissance. It is the glorious dawn of the modern cultures with which we live.
It was from that little house with its ivy-covered courtyard and its leaded glass windows, from where light came out for everyone with cheap books and where a great offensive against ignorance was being hatched, which must be continued with real zeal, because ignorance is still terrible and we already know that where there is ignorance it is very easy to confuse evil with good and truth with lies.
Naturally, the powerful who had manuscripts and books on parchment, laughed at the book printed on paper as something despicable and in bad taste that was within everyone's reach.
The book ceased to be an object of culture for a few and became a tremendous social factor. The effects were not felt. Despite persecutions and often serving as fuel for the flames, the French Revolution emerged, the first social work of books.
For persecutions are of no use against the book. Neither armies, nor gold, nor flames can defeat them; for you can destroy a work, but you cannot cut off the heads that have learned from it, for there are thousands of them, and if they are few, you do not know where they are.
Books have been persecuted by all kinds of States and by all kinds of religions, but this means nothing compared to how much they have been loved. For if a fanatic oriental prince burns the library of Alexandria, on the other hand Alexander of Macedonia orders the construction of a very rich box of enamels and precious stones to preserve The Iliad, by Homer; and the Arabs of Cordoba make the marvel of the Mirahb of their mosque to keep in it a Koran that had belonged to the Caliph Omar. And despite who it may bother, libraries flood the world and we see them even in the streets and in the open air of the gardens of the cities.
Every day that passes, the many publishing houses strive to lower prices, and today the book is within everyone's reach in that great daily book that is the press, in that open book of two or three pages that arrives smelling of restlessness and wet ink, in that ear that hears the events of all nations with absolute impartiality; in the thousands of newspapers, true heartbeats of the unanimous heart of the world.
For the first time in its short history, this town has the beginnings of a library. The important thing is to lay the first stone, because I and everyone else will help to build the building.
It is an important event that fills me with joy and I am honoured that it is my voice that is raised here at the moment of its inauguration, because my family has cooperated extraordinarily with your culture. My mother, as you all know, has taught many people in this town, because she came here to teach, and I remember as a child having heard her read aloud so that many could hear her. My grandparents served this town with true spirit and even many of the songs and music that you have sung have been composed by some old poet from my family.
That is why I feel full of satisfaction at this moment and I am addressing those who are fortunate, asking them to help in this work, to give money to buy books as is their obligation, as is their duty. And those who do not have the means, let them come and read, let them come and cultivate their intelligence as the only means of their economic and social liberation. It is necessary that the library be nourished with new books and new readers and that teachers strive not to teach children to read mechanically, as so many unfortunately still do, but to instill in them the meaning of reading, that is, the value of a period and a comma in the development and form of a written idea.
And books! Books! It is necessary that books begin to arrive at the little library in La Fuente. I have written to the publishing house of the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, where I studied for so many years, and to Editorial Ulises, to see if I can get them to send their complete collections here, and of course, I will send the books that I have written and those of my friends.
Books of all tendencies and of all ideas. The divine, enlightened works of mystics and saints, as well as the fiery works of revolutionaries and men of action. Let the Spiritual Canticle of Saint John of the Cross, the crowning work of Spanish poetry, be compared with the works of Tolstoy; let The City of God by Saint Augustine be compared with Zarathustra by Nietzsche or Capital by Marx. Because, dear friends, all these works agree on a point of love for humanity and elevation of the spirit, and in the end, they all merge and embrace in a supreme ideal.
And readers! Many readers!
This library has to fulfill a social purpose, because if the number of readers is cared for and encouraged, and little by little it is enriched with works, within a few years there will be a noticeable, and do not doubt this, a higher level of culture in the people. And if this generation that hears me today does not take advantage of all that books can give due to lack of preparation, your children will take advantage of it. Because it is necessary that you all know that people do not work for ourselves but for those who come after us, and that this is the moral sense of all revolutions, and in the last instance, the true sense of life.
I am sure that Fuente Vaqueros, which has always been a town with a lively imagination and a clear and cheerful soul like the water that flows from its fountain, will get a lot out of this library and will serve to bring to the consciousness of everyone new desires and joys for knowledge. May this modest and small lesson serve so that you love them and seek them out as friends. Because people die and they become more alive every day, because trees wither and they are eternally green and because at all times and at all hours they open to answer a question or provide comfort.
And you must know, of course, that social progress and revolutions are made with books and that the people who lead them often die, like the great Lenin, from studying too much, from trying to encompass too much with their intelligence. That weapons and blood are of no use if ideas are not well oriented and well digested in the minds. And that it is necessary for people to read in order to learn not only the true meaning of freedom, but also the current meaning of mutual understanding and of life.
And thanks to you all. This public library is now a reality.
And a greeting to everyone. To the living and the dead, since the living and the dead make up a country. To the living, to wish them happiness and to the dead, to remember them fondly because they represent the tradition of the town and because thanks to them we are all here. May this library serve as a source of peace, spiritual restlessness and joy in this beautiful town where I have the honor of having been born, and do not forget this beautiful saying that a 19th century French critic wrote : “Tell me what you read and I will tell you who you are.”
Full speech in its original Spanish here.
