The Europe Challenge

1592: Galileo Galilei moves from his hometown of Pisa to take on a new position as professor of mathematics at the University of Padova. The city, where he asserts having spent ‘the best eighteen years of my life’, was the backdrop for many of his most important discoveries, which forever altered the way we think about the universe—and ourselves.

The library was absolutely the last place I intended to visit in Padova. After four gruelling years, I had finally earned my English Literature degree a few weeks earlier, and intended my time in Italy to be a brief respite from all things academic before I started graduate school in the fall. The city itself seemed to have other plans, though. It was 2022, and the university was celebrating its 800-year anniversary. Everywhere I looked, there were reminders of the enduring power of education, from the cardinal-red shirts emblazoned with the number 800 in bold lettering above the university’s insignia everyone seemed to wear, to the Galileo-themed baubles I found in every souvenir shop. Being in such an environment prompted me to think about the foundations of my own scholarly career.

Despite the constant insinuation from my friends that I pick a major with more lucrative job prospects, I ultimately loved books too much to study anything else. When I was younger, my dad used to take me to the library almost every day, and together we would select armfuls of stories to read in a big rocking chair by the window. I often read aloud to him, but he was always there to help me pronounce the unfamiliar words. As I got older, he started working longer hours, and reading became a solitary activity, something I did to block out the world around me. I stopped frequenting the library for fun, too: at university, I only did my work there when my favourite cafés were closed, and barely cared to borrow any books—let alone anything else the place had to offer.

1604: In Padova, Galileo makes his first astronomical observation, a supernova. The event was thought at the time to be the birth of a star, but today we know that it was actually the death of one. His lectures on the event use parallax measurements to prove that it took place far beyond the moon, a conclusion that contradicted the notion of Earth as the centre of the universe that was accepted and propagated by the Catholic Church.

I was eating breakfast on a patio overlooking the Torre dell’Orologio, a massive tower featuring a 24-hour clock painted in shades of blue and decorated with zodiac signs and miniature golden stars, when I got the call from my sister. The time difference didn’t concern me much: 8pm seemed like a normal enough hour, until I heard the exhausted quality to her voice.

They had been at the hospital all day, she explained, after my dad felt a pain in his calf bones, so severe that he could barely get up. Neither one of us could understand half the medical terminology she spouted, but the gist of it was that it seemed like the cancer was back, it was worse, and it had spread. He was wiped out, too, already fast asleep in his hospital bed. I wondered if I should try to buy a plane ticket for that night, but she urged me to enjoy a few more days and come home at the end of the week. He’s gotten over this before, she coaxed me. Or maybe I coaxed myself: I was disoriented, my vision and hearing blurred. The only thing I could make out was the constant motion of the minute hand on the clock in the distance, each tick bringing us ever closer to the day’s end.

That night, wide awake, I packed all my superfluous items back into a suitcase. The only things I left out were a toothbrush, a change of clothes, and my Kindle. It had just hit me that I hadn’t read for pleasure in months, and I couldn’t think of a better time to disappear into a book. I opened every single one of my recent downloads, but just couldn’t get invested in anything new. It wasn’t until the sky started to brighten again that I purchased an old favourite, The Adventures of Pinocchio, even though some international copyright law made it available for purchase only as an audiobook. The narrator lulled me into a much-needed slumber, and I dreamt of my dad, reciting the story I’d read back to him countless times, wanting nothing more than to go back to those days at the library, to hear his voice again.

1609: Inspired by a Dutch invention for viewing faraway entities, Galileo constructs a tube-shaped instrument that can magnify an object so that it appears up to 30 times larger than with the naked eye. The ability to view celestial bodies up close collapses physical distance, and makes the cosmos accessible to anyone, transcending barriers of language and location.

On Thursday, my sister called again, this time making no effort to disguise her concern. Excess calcium produced in our dad’s tumour-ridden bones had seeped into his bloodstream, causing him to go into a coma. His vital signs were stable, she assured me, but even that wasn’t so much a silver lining as another delayed storm. There was a chance he could wake up, but in the interim, he was getting weaker and weaker—and I was still an ocean away. I gazed out my window for a while after hanging up. A group of research students walked past, donning identical 800 shirts. I thought of everything that was in store for me once I came home. For now, my dad and I were both frozen in time, suspended between past and future, enmeshed in separate stories with equally unclear endings.

I’m still not quite sure why I went to the library. The laws of physics seemed to contradict my decision: gravity should have worked against my weary body as I climbed to the second floor of the Centro Culturale Altinate, but something in me persevered. Once inside, I thought of looking for a book to distract me from everything. It took me a minute to realise I couldn’t even read most, if any, of them, and somehow that was what finally made me burst into tears. I collapsed into a plastic chair and buried my face in my hands in a feeble attempt to stifle my sobs. I would have stayed in that position all day had it not been for the tap I felt between my shoulder blades. A girl had taken the chair next to mine and set a copy of what was likely the first English book she could find—Twilight—on the table. I shook my head, expecting her to leave. Instead, she opened her arms, as though offering me a hug. I nodded, and for the first time all trip, I didn’t need a phrasebook to understand what she was trying to say.

1610: Galileo publishes the Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger), a compilation of findings from his telescope, many of which further contradict the church’s geocentric doctrine by proving that the planets revolve around the sun. A few months later, he leaves Padova. No longer protected by the lenient Venetian Republic, Galileo’s work earns him accusations of heresy. Convicted by the church, he spends the remainder of his life under house arrest, but the truths he reveals about the nature of the heavens persist, setting the foundation for both the scientific and religious revolutions that are to come.

I spent the entirety of my final day in Padova at the library with my new friend. Through swapping messages on Google Translate, we found out how much we had in common: we both studied literature, preferred The Idiot to The Brothers Karamazov, and secretly hated coffee. A few years earlier, her grandfather had battled cancer too, and she understood the complex mixture of emotions that I felt. Unlike the cafés I frequented, no one seemed to mind that we occupied the same table for hours. We swapped socials and book recommendations before I left, and it didn’t occur to me until I was back at my hotel that I hadn’t spent that much time in a library since I was a kid—with my dad.

I boarded my flight back to the US with little certainty of what my life would look like in a few months. The prospect of starting at grad school, which used to enthral me, now felt daunting. I thought of taking a gap year to spend more time with my family and visit my dad as much as possible. Either way, though, I made a resolution to go my local library more often, wherever it ended up being. I already had a reading list long enough to get me through the next decade, but I had come to realise that books were not just meant to be studied, but shared as well. Cherished stories become a part of our collective vernacular, a language that can communicate for us when we have difficulty in forming the words on our own. Having a space devoted to this uniquely collaborative kind of learning is essential for forging connections in an increasingly atomised society. The true power of the library does not lie in the checked-out books themselves, but in the gaps they leave on the shelves, through which you can meet someone in the next aisle, and shine a light on the universal themes that connect us, proving that no matter how disparate our lives may seem, we are all shining under the same sky, united by something much bigger than our differences.

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About the Author

Carissa Coane (b. 2003) is a writer from Los Angeles, California. Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies. She is 21.