Back to Sweden (1): Black Tuesday

Black Tuesday
What I am going to tell is perhaps to some incredibly insignificant, and yet I am going to tell it. I am just not sure whether it is about a cultural clash or about a more objective reality. Let me tell the story and then reflect.
A few days earlier I had just returned to Sweden and Uppsala from Cape Town and had been away for about a year. At the university library, Carolina Rediviva, I paid a visit to my desk which I have retained while being away. A few rather unimportant books of mine still occupied the two shelves, no loans from the library stock to be returned. I had kept the table with a good conscience as the last couple of years the research hall where the table is had been half empty; I understood that other arrangements would be made eventually.
A message was placed on our tables regarding a meeting that would take place the following morning. The future of the particular hall would be discussed with a view to some changes; those who had been having research places were invited to the meeting.
Then next morning the meeting had started a couple of minutes before nine. The chief librarian spelt out that this building extension from the 1960s was a creation of the well known architect Peter Celsing, concrete walls unplastered and large glass window openings enabling daylight access (the main part of Carolina is much older and is in fact a magnificent building from the 19th century). The building would not be altered at all but the son of Peter Celsing, also an architect, following in his father’s foot steps, had been assigned to see to the internal rearrangements. It was hard to understand the point in making this kind of introduction as the only change that could be gathered was that individual reading places would be converted into group tables and glassed-in rooms contained in the larger room.
We were about twenty odd people listening to this. Another two librarians added on some practical details regarding the changes. My question was of course what would happen to those who had had research tables in this hall, where would they go? I asked but got the answer that it could not be said until later in the year.
I only recognised one person whose name I knew. It was Professor Thure Stenström, retired professor of literature. He asked the chief librarian the following. Why convert this hall into group reading places now? Group reading was the trend some 20 years ago, but I have discovered, he said, that there is today again a clear interest in going back to individual reading places for our young researchers. The chief librarian answered that he as coming from the law faculty could only see that group activities were in focus and the need was there.
There was no problem in seeing this need, but the way the whole thing was presented was a problem to me. The chief librarian for example, did not differentiate between undergraduates and postgraduates, and ironically, all of us listening to him were postgraduates or rather post-doctors.
It was not only that the presentation was extremely dull and mainly irrelevant to those of us who were there. The atmosphere was quite impersonal and stiff. I tried to talk to the other two librarians and the lady in question promised to attend to my request later in the year when things had become clearer as she said; the other librarian, who certainly knows who I am seemed utterly frustrated and on my question regarding where I could be housed in the future he retorted, “in fact these research desks are ‘ill disposed’ (illasinnade), they should not have been there in the first place”. I was stunned, perhaps he was frustrated or angry about somebody else that I did not know anything about, and his usage of this word might reveal that he was after another person (or all of us who had had the privilege to have a research desk) as he used this term ‘ill disposed’, because you are ill disposed towards a person rather than a thing.
The whole atmosphere was deadening, all seemed depressed, not a simple smile no humour – and I found myself in one of the best equipped libraries in the world with fantastic facilities for not only researchers but also for ordinary students, yes even the public are welcome to use the library.
At this point I had become ill disposed towards my old library, where I had spent many hours, a stone throw away from my work place the Church House; perhaps only thanks to old Carolina I was in the end able to finalise my studies as I all the years was employed full time with the church. Was my frustration about now seeing my table be taken away in favour of some less motivated group activities? I don’t think so.
When I see my old society from some angles, I find it utterly depressing, yes I in fact mean that people are depressed, and yet they have everything, they are all so privileged! People don’t talk to each other, they don’t laugh.
And yet, this is not the whole truth, not at all. At this Carolina, I had a hide away, that was my refuge, without it I would have been doomed, I would have achieved nothing. And despite this being my hide away I talked to many people in there and I had some very good friends, the first and foremost perhaps being Professor Torild Dahlquist, the great philosopher of the Hägersten School; he had (has?) a wonderful, lucid mind.
It is also grossly unfair to be judgmental in such a way about my old country. The perception of dullness and depression could easily be turned into the opposite. I admit to this and in effect to being quite ambivalent. In fact I am the one who is at fault.
It struck me that just having come back to Sweden after another very intensive year in Cape Town in church and society, at the university etc., I was not quite prepared for a different kind of society with a different kind of mentality. I cannot judge and I don’t think that the one is better than the other, but I can say this: I come from a society where there is constant communication, endlessly so, and it is almost always a very friendly kind of communication. Cape Town also has its share of hatred and violence and if you drive daily through very thick traffic you have to be careful and beware of road rage. It is as if there is no neutral ground, even now long after apartheid, you either hate or love, you either kill or sacrifice your life for others; anything in between seems inappropriate and scarce; the university is an over-friendly place, students almost always being very polite, perhaps they are not always honest; I also realise that a large part of that friendliness is offered by the poor, whom we always will have in our midst in Africa it seems. In Sweden there are no poor people, all are equal, and we do not owe one another anything and the net result easily becomes very boring.
Was what I experienced at the university library of Uppsala real? Or was I the problem? Or both? Was it a clash of cultures in my own frame of reference or was I experiencing real dullness, real depressing behaviour? Be that as it may, but that Tuesday, 11 May was a Black Tuesday.