Danny's Magnificent Defeat
My Top-Down Dream

My Life in Books

What's the last time you went to a library? And I don't mean to just pick up a book. I mean to study, research, or just browse the shelves.

That's what I thought. That long.

I love libraries, particularly the old ones with bifocaled, pansophic ancient librarians that enforce a strict code of silence, shushing the gregarious. That's rare these days, and yet libraries should be quiet places, full of reverence and awe, places where you can think and daydream and even succumb to an osmotic nap on an open Intro to Anthropology book. I did.

In college I studied in a carrel by the window on the ninth and top floor of the book stack. Sometimes for a study warmup I'd run up the nine flights of stairs, just because I could. At the landing, winded, I would pause and compose myself, opening the door only when my breathing slowed, stepping into the quiet, breathing in the musty, inky smell of old books, settling into my place by the window. I looked out on the green trees of a local neighborhood and wondered what calculus meant, if I had made a mistake taking it, what I should do with my life, until I put the equation-filled tome aside and walked the corridors of history books, found something interesting and, absorbed, settled in.

Today, libraries are less for the solitary as for collaborators, chatty groups that ping-pong ideas off each other, and for Internet “research.” This can be shallow. And silence? Forget that. James Billington, head of the Library of Congress, says columnist Brian Bethune, “considers [libraries] crucial in the defense of global democracy, for the librarian-less Internet is no substitute. Billington [says] online life resembles an echo chamber, while in a library, contradictory arguments sit side by side on a shelf. That makes the library, Billington proclaims, the world’s best ‘antidote to fanaticism.’”

Fanaticism? Democracy? I wasn’t thinking about any of this in 1976. I was trying to get by, to figure things out. To figure me out. Snow drifted past the window by my carrel. Dusk came, and headlights and streetlights flicked on, and and even heavier silence fell on the library. Open until midnight, lonely volumes sought to be read, to matter. I ran my hand along the books, sometimes, imagined I could absorb their collected wisdom that way. “Read me,” “choose me,” they might have said, and some I courted, some I spurned. Their sad bindings slipped deeper into the darkness.

But you are probably thinking, you need a life, friend. Well, I got a life, eventually. I met a girl and married, but kept the books for mistress. Even now their siren call beckons.

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