A starting point

"Perded toda esperanza, vosotros los que entráis" ("Lose all your hopes, you who are coming in"). If my memory isn´t playing tricks with me, this was the inscription that, as a welcome message, received all the damned to the ethernal punishments, according to the Hell´s vision that Il Dante imagined in the Inferno.

At the entrance of our libraries, there should be a similar phrase, but in the reverse sense: "Look for hopes, you who are coming in". And, inside every librarian, there should be beating a third sentence: "Generate hopes, you who are able to do it".

To point out that libraries´ visitors look for hopes in us and in our shelves would be to repeat texts already wirtten. It sounds romantic, yes, but I prefer this romantic point of view rather than facing terms like "client". Sometimes I wonder if somebody really pretend that human knowledge (one of the little common heritages that still belongs to all and every of us) can be sold, in despite of common sense and the hundreds of international recommendations, declarations and ethic codes on free access to information.

I also wonder if some facet of our existence still remains without being quantified, measured, valuated, quoted and entered in the value market...

After wondering all this, I remember that men sell Nature like if they were they owners instead of a weak, ignorant and disconnected part of it. And I understand a lot of things...

Anyway... The hopes looked for among books are a lot, and a lot of colleagues must have lived these tiny, daily miracles of the encounter between the book (and the hopes inside it) and the reader: student without resources that overcome exams and get degrees; children that open their eyes to new words, and old people who want to go back to these worlds, tired of long and difficult ways; women who want to strip of the chains put to them by a machist society, and men who want to overcome their fears and ignorances for confronting an elitist and successful society; blinds who can see, dumbs who can speak, deafs who can hear....

Definitively, they are the hopes of human beings who know by intuition -from some corner placed somewhere inside the skin- that the word "impossible" in an adjective created by a few ones for managing the life of the "many" who still believe in dictionary´s definitions.

To generate hopes, to give answers to these hopes, that is our primary duty. I guess that each one will find the fairiest and most balanced way of facing this task, according to their professional qualities and personal possibilities. The important point is not to forget the mission. To teach it, if we are teachers. To learn it, if we are students. To divulgate it, if we are workers. And to face it, and to exercise it daily, from research and reference to classification or teaching. Let it become a part of our mind, of our soul.... Let accept it like a duty, a moral obligation, like another point to add into a written or tacit ethic code. I am sure that this will be a good starting point for being proud of our profession, for loving our work... or for starting to love it, if we still didn´t understand what we do and who we are....

Because, as Jorge Luis Borges wrote, I have always imagined Paradise like a library. And, at its entrance, an inscription, a positive copy of Dante´s one...

"Look for hopes, you who are coming in".