Living in the Library of Heaven

When I was a kid if I’d imagined Heaven it would have been this: a place with the world’s biggest library and I have a library card.

Now I’m in Heaven and it’s better than I imagined: the library has got books; it’s got music; its got videos; it’s always open; it keeps getting better; the research librarian is incredibly capable and I can eat while I read. It’s the Internet, of course.

One night I got up at three in the morning with a song in my head. I knew the name of the song—“Over the Rainbow” but didn’t know who sang—the version in my head. I just knew I loved it. Within a half hour (only because I was so lame in those days) I’d found the song, knew who sang it, downloaded it from iTunes, put it on my iPod and was able to listen to it endlessly for the next month. Let’s hear it for the Library.

When I thought of writing this Blog (sadly, many months before I wrote the first post) the name “What passes for wisdom” came to me. I thought it was cool. So many months later when I actually decided to write my first post (sadly, still many months before I actually wrote that first post) I Googled for the phrase to see if I could find something interesting to say about it. The second hit led me to a site that sold stickers that said: “What passes for wisdom may only be eloquent foolishness.” I thought that was pretty cool, but I didn’t want to have a sticker company as my reference.

So I Googled for the two phrases: “what passes for wisdom” and “eloquent foolishness” and got a Google Books citation for a book called “Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World” by David W. Orr published in 1992. The quote in the book said “be only” rather than “only be” but there it was.

Now this book might have sold only 20 copies, one of which would have been in the Library of Congress, one in the Library of Heaven, and the rest in the libraries of David Orr’s family, for all I know. But there was one in the 24x7 Internet Library, the one that’s right here on my computer or a few IP hops away.

I’m in Heaven.

For those interested in the details: here’s a link to the phrase in Orr’s book and here’s one of dozens of versions of Iz’s song on YouTube. Here’s another.

By the way: when I tried to reproduce the story of finding Orr’s book for this post, I couldn’t find it, because (unknown to me) on my second search I put in the whole phrase from the sticker, which did not match the book because of the reversal of words. So I went to my Google Search history, searched the search history, and found the original search string and original citation and was able to do the research needed to finish the story behind this post without pain.

Let’s hear it for Google Search. Let’s hear it for Google Search History. Let’s hear it for Google Search History Search. Let’s hear it for living in the Library of Heaven.