Somehow, I came to believe that a library would heal me. It was eight months into the war in Gaza. I was living in Bethlehem with my husband, who is a parish priest, and our three children. The death toll was rising every day. I couldn’t sleep. Some mornings, I felt so helpless that I struggled to get out of bed.
One day, I saw a picture of a distant library, with high shelves, arches, wooden desks—and rooms where you could spend the night. I applied to stay for a week to do research and was accepted, though I wouldn’t be able to go for another year.
In Victorian novels, sometimes a sick patient is prescribed time by the sea. I thought that any reasonable doctor, faced with a patient in despair, might prescribe a week at the library. The knowledge of that library on the horizon carried me through the darkest days of the war. When I couldn’t pray, I read the library catalog.
