Discovered in my documents folder.

[I still feel this way.]

Olin Memorial Library, 19-06-07.

This is the image of me attempting to craft, from nothing, a future. The image of a girl-woman seated in the great expanse of air and windows in a library reading room.

Her hair knotted ingeniously, sitting on her heels in the too-low chair, squinting and pulling faces as she peruses lists of requirements, demands, standards. She cannot hold herself against these lists, cannot compare with cold scrutiny some image of herself with the abstract of desirability.

She has sent off, already, one cry for help, one request for rescue, whose destinataire has either not received it or been unwilling to respond.

She turns to examine the summery cascade of freckles that spill down from her shoulders, the six bracelets of wooden beads on one wrist, the Touareg device in silver on her right index finger. She stands and stretches and walks away down to the ladies’ to examine her prototypical self in the mirror.

“What is this?” she would wonder aloud if not for the librarianess standing next to her. “What is this fleeting thing in this mirror, here?”

That figure has learned herself, over the years, she realizes. The woman in the mirror has learned to say “I”.

But what now? Now with this “I” tucked cleverly in her pocket, where will she go? And how will she get there?

She can no longer contemplate these long lists of demands, can no longer face the prospect of opening some line of communication for the sake of marketing a self she is not sure of. That it is there, this self, she is certain. At least there is that.

But what can it do? When push comes to shove or when the shit hits the fan or when simply it comes down to it, of what is this self capable?

There is, of course, no way to know. That is what she cannot face, today, as the wind outside the window fades and the trees on the hill grow still and silent. What she cannot face, today, in this library that has cradled her through all her mind’s misadventures and furious yearnings, is the possibility that it ends here. That the next step is too brazen and broad for her small form to manage, that the path may be not only meandering and twilight-obscure, but may also be simply not there.

Open letters

Dear NYPL,

You are not closing at all over the holidays. In this and in all other ways, you bless me by your very existence. I can’t wait to see you again — it has been far too long, my love. I know you’ve been seeing other readers. It’s okay. We said we’d take a break. I haven’t been the most faithful gal in the world, either. But the BL and I? We’re over*. I promise. I’m coming home, love.

Kisses,

Mouse

———————

Dear University of Otherstate,

You want to know who I am. You seem actually to care who I am. For this demonstration of your fundamental humanity, I thank you. For setting an example for how to make graduate admissions a mutually respectful process, I commend you. I sincerely hope we have an opportunity to work together soon. I look forward to hearing from you.

All best,

Mouse.

———————

Dear Zoë Wanamaker,

Marry me.

All my everything and more,

Mouse

———————

*For now.

Belatedly, Moreana and neuroses

My infatuation with Thomas More continues. I’ve spent much of this week in the rare book room at the British Library — ohhh, glory. Musty, delicate glory in fine secretary black-letter (thank you, Master Rastell). More on this later.

For now, a belated Despondent Humanist instalment. Nobody else likes them, but I do. So they stay.

Further to my last post, good reader, riddle me this: why is it that I cannot, absolutely cannot, encounter anything to do with More’s eldest and favorite daughter, Margaret, without weeping my bloody eyes out? The biographies are cheesy propaganda — still, I weep. I’ve read his last letter to her at least a dozen times. Still, I weep. Monday in the café, over my yogurt and coffee, weeping. Today in the reading room near closing time, typing my notes, weeping. Why?

I reproduce that final letter in full after the jump.

In which mouse is embarrassed to find that her sense of entitlement is hanging out

So, reader. I said that I have no doubts or reservations of any kind about my new university. This is still, mostly, true. However.

The library.

Reader, I am so unbearably spoiled. I knew that I had been blessed by libraries, but I didn’t know how blessed, how spoiled. The libraries that taught me what libraries are include: the Petri Dish’s substantial collections beautifully housed, Georgetown University’s ugly, depressing but well-stocked system, the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library’s Humanities branch. I spent more time than I needed to in one particularly Victorian reading room in Beloved Library during undergrad, or wandering the stacks, my fingers trailing over rows of spines, or curled up under Tolstoy, tucked away where no one could find me and my books and my papers. And that is where the self who decided to trip off across the ocean to nourish the Scholar Within was born.

Libraries, in short, are important to me, as they are to probably everyone who reads this, and probably in much the same ways. The space, as much as the content, of a library shapes my experience of work. I have been spoiled, spoiled, spoiled.

Yesterday, I had my first serious poke around Brit Uni’s library. What an incredibly, horribly depressing place. The light inside is the same colour as the light inside Penn Station. The walls are a greyish-brown concrete. The windows are small and ill-placed, the ceilings heavy and ponderous (also concrete). A sense of darkness huddles over every space. I can’t imagine doing work there — except, perhaps, for the chain-yourself-to-a-desk-because-this-has-to-get-done-NOW-no-excuses kind of work to which poor spaces are sometimes suited. Just as well, because it closes at nine. (What on earth do the undergrads do about that?)

And its collections are… well, sparse. It boasts a respectable number of volumes, but most of these are multiple copies of single books used in classes. The books are poorly looked-after, scribbled over and over and over, their spines cracking and bending. Many of them are paperback, and therefore disintegrating. Many Big Works of scholarship in the areas I’m familiar with (early modern and modernism) are not represented. Forget any of the Medium-to-Not-So-Big works. What is there tends to the radical, which pleases me — but seriously, kids. Are we really all traipsing off to the British Library every time we have a vague research need that can’t be satisfied by the internet?

“Yes, mouse,” will come the tired, impatient-growing reply, “we are. And you are effing spoiled rotten.”

I will note, however, that as far as I can tell the pre-modernists are conspiring exceedingly well to funnel as much cash as they can into special collections — as noted, this library holds a surprisingly spectacular array of early books, for which a brand-new, extremely shiny reading room has just been installed. For this, I am deeply grateful, and such a thing is not, ever, to be discounted.

What my experience of dismay comes down to, of course, is money, and the place of higher education within the socio-economic structure of this country (of most of Europe, for that matter). I never realized just how wealthy the Petri Dish is as an institution — a wealth that could only be accumulated in a culture that prizes higher education for its elitism, not, as in Europe, for its populist potential. The P.D. and Brit Uni are roughly equivalent in terms of “quality,” well-regardedness, general pedagogical philosophies, overriding political tone, and Archetypal Student. Except that (well, white, Northeastern, educated) Americans feel that an education that doesn’t cost a fortune isn’t worthwhile, while Britons are still scandalized by the fact that they have to pay anything at all for what was once free. And so the P.D. is shiny and bright, and its resource cup spilleth over, while Brit Uni is a little scruffy around the edges, and gives a sense of a bit of a scramble to maintain what it has.

I was aware of these differences, but they didn’t come home to me until I saw that library. It made me realize that I come not only from a wealthy family but from a whole culture of wealth — wealth of the big, material, institutional kind, and the expectations it fosters. I wonder what this has done to my brain. Am I intellectually “soft,” for having been raised on the educational feather-bed of a Northeastern SLAC? Has the fact that I have been accustomed to buying, not borrowing, my course books made me somehow weak? Why is it so embarrassing to discover that I am so deeply spoiled in ways to which I never devoted sufficient consideration?

(And, uh, that thing about tigers and stripes? Yeah, my next step today is to seek out a cheap copy of Renaissance bloody Self-Fashioning, because I refuse to use the one that has jargon spewed all over it in electric pink ink. We won’t even mention the state of the Shakespeare.)

In which crazies figure strongly

What is it about public research libraries? The crazies! The crazies! Reader, I love them.

There’s the man who sits in the southernmost end of the Rose room at the NYPL’s Humanities branch, doing Sudoku puzzles from opening to closing.

There’s the severe lawyerish gal at the Library of Congress who had her chignon pulled just a little too tight one day and, infuriated by my incessent clack-clack-clacking (known to saner folks as “note-taking”) marched over to my seat and before I could ask her what the hell she thought she was doing, pressed the power button on my laptop, glaring a Botoxed glare, and then harrumphed back to her seat. When I suggested to the reference librarian that something Ought To Be Done about her, he looked furtively around, inclined his head conspiratorially and said “I would complain about her, but I think she works for Rick Santorum.” I tried to chuckle with him about the famous Savage Love riff on that score, but by his further furtive flitting I determined that he, too, was A Public Research Library Crazy.

And there’s the sweet old lady who made friends with me the other day in the Baltic and Slavic reading room at the NYPL. A portrait: the electric orange hair proper to women of her age in eastern Europe, an electric tweed skirt suit of motley oranges and yellows, a dozen gemmed rings matching each of the colors of her motley. A pile of books in Russian and notes in an elegant Cyrillic hand. She turns to me to whisper – conspiratorially, what else – in Russian. I smile and shake my head to indicate that I have not a word of that language. No matter. She gestures and whispers on, periodically turning to me – I can only imagine – to elucidate some splendid point in her research. Ever in Russian. She attempts to pass me – surreptitiously, under the table, what else – baked goods she’s extracted from her voluminous electric orange bag. And she turns back to her copious notes in her elegant hand and I find her suddenly beautiful.

I could go on. But the point is that I’ve never encountered these people in the more protected realms of university libraries, rare book rooms, and so on. Who is that Russian lady? Does the chignon really work for Santorum, and what does that have to do with sabotaging my notes on early modern engravings of disparate body parts? Is the Sudoku man unravelling the mysteries of the universe through a systematic ordering of numbers? What is it about public research libraries?