Friendly Spaces

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”

Jorge Luis Borges

In each place I arrive to this year, I hope to find a community. It doesn’t need to be a large community; it’s doesn’t even, really, need to be a forever kind of community. Just some people with which to share the experience of the days I have in that place, to help fulfil the basic human need for socialisation and contact with others. 

In most places, I’ve found that without too much difficulty. Other internationals, often; also seeking their community in places that are new, or new-ish, to them. Locals, occasionally; especially once I migrated into the northern countries where it seems that even for those born and bred, making new friends can be something of a challenge.

The moments where I haven’t found it, due to the remoteness of the location or the demographic make-up of the place, have been some of the hardest of this year. I wrote already of the extreme isolation I felt while cocooned in a coastal town in Italy, in which I spoke to no one but the supermarket cashier and one hairdresser for about two weeks.

I knew Oslo would be one of the challenges; that this was another insular Nordic society where integrating into the local communities is not straightforward. And even as the days passed in which I met no one, talked to no one, I took comfort in that I did not feel isolated in the way I had the last time. I was at least in a city, where I could go to third spaces like the cinema or a local coffee shop, and be surrounded by people, even if I was still sat by myself.

In that coastal town in Italy, I was truly alone. In Oslo, I am just lonely. And there is a difference.

Having already determined that I didn’t see the rest of my life in Oslo, nor in Norway as a whole, and therefore had no urgent need to make a more permanent, fixed community here, I went in search of temporary solutions for my loneliness. And in doing so, found that spaces could be as friendly – or, maybe, even friendlier – than people.

In almost every place I’ve been, I’ve adopted spaces that become part of who I am as I exist in there. These might be local bars and cafés; parks or walking trails; even my local laundromat in Copenhagen where I would sit and read for an hour or two while waiting for my laundry load to finish, exchanging the odd word with the owner as he came and went running errands.

In Oslo, my adopted space is a small yet beautiful library tucked in the back corner of the National Museum. You probably wouldn’t find it if you didn’t know where to look, which I assume accounts for the fact that there are rarely more than a few people here. It is quiet in a gentle way; not a stifled or manufactured silence, just that of a handful of individuals in the midst of the sanctuary of the bookshelves. 

I come here to write, typically. I am writing this text here. A woman sits one desk over, frowning at an array of papers spread before her. A man sits off to one side, seemingly also writing something. I have no idea what either of them are working on, just as they can have no idea that, after I’ve finished this, I’ll go back to digging into the politics of Hamlet for a book I’ve accidentally started writing. 

But I like to imagine all the thoughts and ideas that may have been discovered within these walls. That each person brings with them their head full of whatever it is they are working on, and this library exists for us all to continue with that task as a community. Even if we never exchange a word, nor so much as a smile. We are together under this roof. We are not alone.

And if you think I give too much credit to one library, well – you would need to see it for yourself. The building itself is relatively new, the library along with it, but it is drenched in rich wood tones illuminated by the colourful spines of the books that fill the stacks. By the large windows at the end of the room are deep armchairs for curling up in the afternoon sun and drinking a coffee. The bustle of the harbour is just around the corner, but I can’t hear or see it from within here.

If I was to have a library in my own house one day, this is how I would want it to look. This is how I would want it to feel. 

By now, I have met one or two people. I attend a weekly writing group in a comfortably noisy bar in the centre of town, and I’ve plans to see an old friend from university who lives here. I am not entirely alone.

But my greatest companion in this city is this little library. On the days I am in a bad mood, which have been more than usual of late for a variety of reasons, I do not have to explain this to the library. I do not have to present myself a certain way; I do not even have to speak, when I don’t at all feel like speaking. But I can come here, armed with my laptop and notebook and sometimes a sandwich to eat out in the sunny courtyard in the middle of the day, and be welcomed in, and feel a little bit less alone in this wide world.