LAST WEEK I WAS INVITED backstage in the British Library to look at some of the books and manuscripts. Everything you would want to see is there; Coleridge's notebooks - small, squat leather-bound volumes, water stained from all that walking favoured by the Romantic poets, and filled with spidery handwriting on beauty and imagination. William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience is as luminous and strangely beautiful as you would expect, just as seeing a handmade illustrated book by Ted Hughes and Leonard Baskin is a reminder that writers and artists, like children, make things for pleasure, not profit. If the money comes in, well and good, but the driving purpose is closer to Blake's joy than Bentham's utilitarianism.

Margaret Thatcher, of course, was a utilitarian, a dismal philosophy now embraced by Gordon Brown and welded to the famous Blair anti-elitism. The British Library has had to prove itself to be the “people's” library, with access and education programmes to the fore, and plenty of crowd-pulling exhibitions - and last year, with its funding threatened, it had to prove its usefulness too. The plan was to charge users, restrict access, and cut acquisition funding. After all, how many people actually used and really needed its services?

This taxi-driver approach to culture, (why should I pay for it if I don't want it? BBC, opera, theatre, etc), never acknowledges that the mark of a civilised society is making its achievements a matter of pride - not a matter of debate.

Every time we ask: “What are books worth, what is art worth, what is a liberal education worth, why fund culture?” we devalue the very stuff that says we are more than eat, sleep, shop, sex, work.

Arguments about art and culture are arguments that strike at the heart of what it is to be a human being. Human beings are not machines, nor are we simply animals. The need to create, and to leave a record of ourselves through what we create, is as old as we are. I was in Australia recently, and on a lonely river far from anywhere, my guide paddled me over to see an Aboriginal rock painting. The fact is that what the British Library guards and the fish that the Aboriginal carved are part of the same continuum.

Until 1997 the library was part of the British Museum, and the Reading Room was a hallowed place, as intimidating as it was imposing. I wrote half of The Passion there, because it was warm and quiet, and because I lived below a concert pianist. Marx wrote Das Kapital, and Virginia Woolf famously described this favourite place of hers in A Room of One's Own: “One stood under the vast dome, as if one were a thought in the huge bald forehead which is so splendidly encircled by a band of famous names.”

The new purpose-built library is impressive, though not imposing nor intimidating, and I cannot imagine writing a book there, perhaps because user-friendliness has gone too far, and the “people's” library swarms with whispering students enjoying the free wi-fi access.

In the online digital library at www.bl.uk you can “turn” the pages of Leonardo's notebooks, or decipher Magna Carta. However, Magna Carta is usually on display, and my godchildren were both pretty impressed with something written in 1215. Needless to say, since Ray Winstone's “I've come to kill your monsta”, the manuscript of Beowulf has been a big hit.

My favourite non-book resource at the Library is the National Sound Archive. You can look this up on the internet and listen to the changing voice of Britain, a poignant and somewhat unsettling experience, because we are losing linguistic and dialect difference so fast.

Change is inevitable and often for the best, but change always means loss, and in times of rapid change, art and culture can provide a much-needed sense of continuity. We are not isolated self-justifying fragments of history, we are part of the stretch of humanity - a humanity to be found in the pages of Beowulf, through to the box of Angela Carter papers that had just arrived at the library, still uncatalogued.

As I walked out across the square, past the Antony Gormley sculpture, and into the rush of Euston Road, it seemed to me that being one tiny dot, as we all are, isn't so bad if you know that you can join the dots, and that there is a pattern and a meaning.

That alone should satisfy people power and pragmatists alike.

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