Miles From Any Town
Bruce Newell, Helena
Throughout this last month I’ve been driving Montana installing AEDs (Automated External Defibrillators) and AED cabinets in libraries, bringing to completion The Trust for Montana Libraries’ two-year project that benefits twenty-nine project libraries and the communities they serve.
Motoring about, I was repeatedly reminded of Richard Hugo’s poem, Driving Montana. Like Hugo, I was …
… lost in miles of land without people, without
one fear of being found, in the dash
of rabbits, soar of antelope, swirl
merge and clatter of streams.
Spring is the beginning of Montana’s second season, the first being Winter and as everybody knows the second being Construction. While I was slowed or halted many times for road work, I never was inconvenienced one iota by the having to stop for a flagger and smell the sagebrush.
My travels took me over 7,260 foot Skalkaho Pass, where roadside snow still blanketed. Further on, winding downward dizzyingly above Daly Creek, Skalkaho Falls was a seamless sheet of white sound and water.
On the HiLine, obscuring my view of the Sweetgrass Hills, magisterial rainstorms scuttled eastward. Further along, crossing from Big Sandy to Winifred, I wheeled over a vanishingly graveled bentonite roadbed, chased by rain while I climbed out of the Judith River Breaks. Dumb luck is better than no luck at all.
Near Miles City the Tongue was full and chocolate brown, its riparian Cottonwoods garbed in the freshest green leaves ever to bedeck a tree. The Yellowstone at Forsyth was bank-full and rushing toward New Orleans — sans brakes, sans parachute.
My trip’s most reliable source of pleasure was visiting Montana libraries and talking with Montana librarians. Librarians are a resilient, resourceful, optimistic, can-do bunch. Every library had something good going on in anticipation of summer. Every librarian had a smile on their face and a nice thing or two to say about their library and their community.
To cheekily continue and conclude by corrupting Hugo’s poetry,
Never has my Toyota
found this forward a gear. Even
the chicken salad in Cut Bank is good.
For that matter, so too is the Strawberry-rhubarb pie,
and a terrific Helles style lager in Hamilton.
Thank you all for your kind welcomes, and in particular for your manifest quiet love of Montana, Montanans, learning, and libraries.
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Bruce Newell is a retired librarian who served Montanans at Helena’s Lewis & Clark Public Library and at the Montana State Library. He is currently a board member with The Trust for Montana Libraries.
Tag: Your Library Matters
Your Library Matters: May 2026
Your Library Matters: Are Libraries Liberal or Conservative?
May 2026
Bruce Newell, Helena
In these partisan political times, it’s easy to overlook the ethical or philosophical meaning of the words liberalism and conservatism. These twinned terms had meaning before they were tied to a political theory or party. Liberalism was linked to the idea of individual liberty or freedom. Conservatism was bound to a skeptical view of change and strongly valuing traditions. When stripped of partisan, social, or economic overtones, liberalism and conservatism taken together offer libraries complimentary lenses for more fully understanding their roles in their communities.
Libraries are the product of a body politic possessing the sometimes antagonistic impulses of individual liberty and social continuity. Libraries, through books (etc) and programming help users explore both the bounds of their freedom and the best of the human story, a narrative itself formed and bound by these two complementary, indispensable philosophies.
In the Wikipedia we read that liberalism speaks to individual rights (freedom) while conservatism is all about preserving institutions and values (continuity):
“Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law.”
“Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values.”
Libraries preserve the past, strive to identify what’s valuable in the present, and carry forward our best stories into the future. This is libraries’ conservative mission. At the same time libraries serve the public good by helping their users thrive. This is an intrinsically liberal impulse.
Libraries, like any institution, find it challenging to identify mile markers to use in evaluating their progress. Looking at libraries’ liberal reasons for being, we can ask ourselves, are we helping our users be free and happy? [1] And at the same time, looking at our conservative mandates, are we preserving the past and ensuring that our users (and tomorrow’s users) have ready access to the most important stories of humanity’s shared past?
Libraries were formed by and are in support of both liberal and conservative philosophies. Great libraries reflect and celebrate the complexities and contradictions inherent in a free, diverse, and heterogeneous society. We can use these two philosophical lenses, liberalism and conservatism, to help us understand the degree to which we are providing our communities with a great library.
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[1] Happiness in the sense that Aristotle, Jefferson, or Locke would have understood it; as in “…certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
A copy of this essay and others in this series can be found at: Montanans For Libraries, https://montanansforlibraries.org/support-libraries
Your Library Matters: April 2026
Your Library Matters: On Reading and Worldview
April 2026
Bruce Newell, Helena
A preliminary note —
I write these essays because libraries are our communities’ shared workplaces in our collective pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. When we advocate for libraries, which we surely need to do, I hope that we are able to lean into the notion that libraries are a necessary public good. And if you work in a library, for money, for love, or for both, I want you to feel proud of what you do.
The essay —
My partner Sue and I are just back in town after a lengthy road trip. While happily motoring along we listened to a wonderful book, The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin. [1] All 36 hours 42 minutes of it.
We were struck by Goodwin’s extraordinary storytelling about a time in America’s history that strikingly parallels our own. For myself, and the focus of this essay, I became increasingly aware of how by listening to and thereby reading this book, [2] my view of the world, my worldview, was being expanded.
Worldview | noun | A particular philosophy of life or conception of the world. Oxford Languages, on the web.
We’re all constantly assembling and expanding our worldviews, and when we read we often journey into exotic terranes. Through books I have climbed Mt. Everest, sailed solo around the world, survived a spaceship wreck on Mars, and been given an intimate glimpse into others’ lives such as Roosevelt’s and Taft’s in Goodwin’s extraordinary biography.
If you will, please imagine that our worldviews are houses made up of many rooms, each with windows admitting a distinct view out into a larger world. Every book we read adds one or more rooms to our house, especially if our reading is accompanied by thought. With books, through reading and reason, we’re expanding and enriching our worldview.
Our worldviews are shaped by the company we keep, whether that company is other people, a book, or a social media platform. It pays to carefully select our companions with their associated worldviews. This is not a new thought, in the book of Proverbs (circa 971–931 BCE) it is written “…Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools suffers harm…” [4]
At the same time, we must remember that mummifying our worldview is as unwise as is consorting with fools. To quote no less an authority than Dr. Seuss, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” [5]
John Locke wrote about this in 1706, advocating a diverse, expansive worldview:
“If men are for a long time accustomed only to one sort or method of thoughts, their minds grow stiff in it, and do not readily turn to another. It is therefore to give them this freedom that I think they should be made to look into all sorts of knowledge, and exercise their understandings in so wide a variety and stock of knowledge.” [6]
Continuing this thought, and echoing or perhaps adding to the book of Proverbs cautions, Locke counsels against merely increasing knowledge without wisdom or discernment, writing:
“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge, it is thinking makes what we read ours.” [ibid]
It’s a beautiful world. My wish for you is that you read deeply and broadly and that you are able to help others do likewise. May reading broaden your worldview and deepen your happiness. Your library is doing good and important work. You are doing good and important work. Keep it up.
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As always, this essay and others can be found at the Montanans for Libraries website. montanansforlibraries.org/support-libraries
[1] Goodwin, Doris Kearns. The Bully Pulpit : Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. Simon & Schuster. 2013. Available on MontanaLibrary2Go.
[2] ‘Audiobooks don’t really count as reading? Think again.’ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/03/audiobooks-dont-really-count-as-reading-think-again/
[3] Proverbs 13:20, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition.
[4] Dr. Seuss, I Can Read with My Eyes Shut! Random House, 1978. Available on MontanaLibrary2Go.
[5] Locke, John. On the Conduct of Understanding. Awnsham and John Churchill, publishers. London, 1706. (posthumously). https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Of_the_Conduct_of_the_Understanding/Of_the_Conduct_of_the_Understanding