The Colors of New

I know it dates me, but I remember well when physical card catalogs were the means of locating a book in a library. The 3 in. x 5 in. cards were kept in small, deep drawers that had a rod running though the cards near their bottom edge so they could not be spilled, disrupting their alphabetical order. In middle school, when my fellow students' class and I were taken to the library, we were taught how to use its card catalog. (In elementary school, simply browsing in the books had been sufficient.) The middle-school librarian taught us that for every book in the library, there were three types of cards in the catalog's wooden drawers: Title card, Author card, and one or more Subject cards.

Having learned that system, when my father took my sister and me to the city's central library, I was delighted upon seeing the massive wall of inviting brown drawers. I could browse through the creme-colored cards with almost as much enjoyment as browsing in the books themselves.

A recent book put out by the Library of Congress informs me that, "Harvard's assistant librarian, Ezra Abbot, is credited with creating the first modern card catalog designed for readers" in the 1860's. Previously, books that were being added to a library had often been merely listed in a librarian's ledger book -- making locating a listing as hard as locating the book itself. Another invention of that time-period was the book's card-pocket, in which a checkout card was kept, removed as a record when the book was borrowed, and replaced upon the book's being returned.

I marvel at not only the efficiency but also the simplicity of these two inventions: They were something any librarian could easily adopt and create on their own. (In contrast, imagine trying to build a computer and write cataloging software, or trying to draw today's barcodes by hand!)

Thinking back upon these changes in libraries, I become more aware of how countless new inventions have appeared during my lifetime. Even staying within the walls of a library, microfilm replaced paper newsprint, but was then itself replaced. Long-playing records were added to some libraries, but then became outdated. Changes in technology have come so fast that two historians, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen (in The Library: A Fragile History) caution today's librarians against jumping too quickly on the bandwagon of the new. Today's innovation can become tomorrow's antique artifact. A newer technology seems to always be just around the corner. Changes occur even more rapidly beyond a library's walls.

When I turn away from human societies and look at Nature, I also find the new, but it is a different type of newness.  I see the bright yellow-green spring-leaves emerging on a tree that had been bare for months. And I see the brilliant pink blooms on an otherwise bare redbud tree. This is a type of newness that is different from human inventions. It is the newness of renewal and rebirth. It is a type of newness that is ancient. And it is reassuring amid a world of human struggle and destruction. For, as the 19th-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:

"... nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things...."

Hopkins saw that type of newness as a gift of God's Spirit, which "broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."

The newspaper's headlines might be only bad news, but the view of spring out my kitchen window is very good news.

~ ~ ~

Is there a way you find a renewal that lies deeper than human innovation?

(The quotation about the catalog is from the book
 The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures, © 2007, p. 82.)
(The lines by Hopkins are from his poem "God's Grandeur.")