I am reading Susan Orlean’s The Library Book, which is about the terrible fire of 1986 at the Los Angeles Central Public Library. I haven't finished it— Kindle tells me I am only 31% through— but already I have cried, and sighed, and have had my heart broken, and lines such as “The sixth and seventh tiers of shelving in the northwest stacks collapsed” hurt some deep part within me. While this is an investigative book of non-fiction, above all, it is a love letter to libraries, library systems, what it means to a person, and what it represents to communities. And I realized:
I have spent a not-inconsiderable amount of my adult life in libraries.
The physical spaces of the libraries I’ve inhabited constitute part of the scaffolding that make up my architecture of self. They form the balustrades and buttresses for the makeshift organization of a large part of my rudderless twenties. The part of me that was enclosed in the quiet between bookshelves, that encountered the shock of recognition in a book, that sat down with burning questions ready for the long journey searching for answers.
I recently returned to the National University of Singapore’s Central Library. It was both nostalgic and disappointing. Nostalgic because some things have stayed the same— Arts Buzz, Perk Point, but others are so unfamiliar it might as well be a different place. The table I wrote at had certainly not been there when I was a student. Many of the armchairs are gone, perhaps due to Covid measures. I’m not sure what I had been expecting— a rush of recognition? Nostalgia that hurt? The disappointment was a little heartbreaking in its bleakness.
No, the first library that shaped the infrastructure of my inner life isn't in Singapore, but New York. I don’t have many memories of Butler Library, the largest library at Columbia University, where most of the books I needed were. Newly motherless and grieving, I shied away from its sun-filled reading rooms, its spacious stateliness.
Instead, on the days I could get out of bed, I dragged myself to the university's smallish C.V Starr East Asian Library. I didn’t work on East Asian studies, and none of the books there were pertinent to my work. But something about the darkness of the place, the ethereal stained glass windows, and poorly-lit alcoves called out to me, had mysterious talismanic powers. I clung to its weathered tables, its terrible chairs, surrounded by books I never borowed, feeling truly alone.
Under the stained-glass gaze of Justice from the huge decorative window, I read obscure books and wrote bad fiction, trying to find answers to a howling question I wasn’t sure how to articulate. For some reason, I have an almost visceral recollection of sitting in this grim library, trying to read and understand French philosopher Maurice Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster. I checked my copy and found that I had underscored the line:
"There is no solitude if it does not disrupt solitude, the better to expose the solitary to the multiple outside."
In the margins, an annotation in my hand, "I understood this yesterday while alone but not today when I'm not."
I still don't. Understand, that is. Maybe that flash of insight during that one moment of aloneness will never cast its pale eye on me again. The desire for solitude is hard to understand, and even harder to explain. All I know is that my dark winter days were fueled by quiet desperation, a withdrawal from the world, and that I was held deep in the underbelly of this dismal library.
Orlean confirms, "The library is an easy place to be when you have no place you need to go and a desire to be invisible."
Harvard's libraries are an academic's wet dream. No matter what arcane subject one somehow found life-years siphoned away into, there are shelves upon shelves of books for one's intellectual gambit.
I could write about the grandeur of Widener Memorial Library, its vast and cavernous stacks, its famous tragic history— of a mother who dedicated a library to a son who perished with the Titanic. Or I could write about the bizarre law that if a single brick is removed, the library will cease to be Harvard's and has to be surrendered to the city of Cambridge.
Widener's lore is deep, its stories myriad.
But I have decided to write about Pusey.
“I can’t believe you used to do your work there,” Q says, shaking her head on Skype.
“Right?? I used to be so afraid of getting raped in that tunnel we have to cross to get to that stupid library.”
“Yeah that tunnel! When I worked there, we were told during orientation to always look over our shoulder when we entered...”
Pusey Library is, without a doubt, one of the least interesting, ugliest libraries at Harvard. First, most of it is underground. Second, you need to enter it via another library. For some reason, its actual entrance is closed off. Third, the lights. Fourth, that hellish tunnel.
To get to Pusey, walk up the grand steps of Widener Library, past security and the metal detectors, swipe your HUID, and turn left into Circulation. Walk towards the librarians waiting behind the imposing curved desk. Try not to notice their eyes flit up, wondering if you're about to ask them to process your library request or pick up your inter-library loan. Casually pass by, eyes averted—no I’m not borrowing anything— and turn right, where the Return desk is. Again indicate, face carefully relaxed with casual apathy— no I’m not returning a book.
The silent, time-honored choreography one performs in these hallowed halls.
The elevator behind the Returns Desk is oddly located at the back of the building, like an apologetic afterthought. Take the excruciatingly slow elevator that smells of brass down four floors to the ominously named 'Level D'. Then walk through the stacks, passing shelves upon shelves of books about Education. You open a door, and then another confounding door to exit the stacks, and are stunned by a dazzle of white— the dreaded underground tunnel that links Widener to Pusey.
This seemingly endless, positively frightening tunnel is a blinding, screaming white. The floors and walls and ceilings are white. Exposed pipes and air vents and metal grates— all painted a glaring, stupefying white. The glare from long, industrial light tubes complete this phosphorous underground nightmare.
Also, this hellhole sucks up sound, like some kind of accidental anechoic chamber. As you cross the tunnel, hear your quickened breath, and the strangely echoless sound of your footsteps. The quiet is so unnatural you feel unsafe, are reminded of certain movies where silence is the conditioned prequel to some unnameable, heinous creature moving in for the kill. Quicken your steps to reach the end. Feel how the hurrying increases the inchoate anxiety.
Reach the end of the tunnel. Open a door, then another dumbfounding door, in order to enter the—not first, but—second floor of Pusey.
It's a huge, disorienting ordeal to even get there, and the library itself is no better. Being below ground, the WiFi isn't great and I often went without. It barely had windows, and I never knew whether it was raining or sunny or snowing outside. The walls were bare, devoid of history, paintings, or even the purposeless wood panelling that dignify most Northeastern American university buildings. Most times, I was one of maybe three people in the whole library. Not a single librarian was stationed there. Those that I’ve seen pass by with book trolleys, but end up returning to the warm history and relevance of Widener.
Pusey is frankly, ridiculous. Everyone tries to keep a straight face when talking about it. “I don’t even know how to pronounce Pusey without laughing,” I told Q. The whole part about having to go down in order to get to Pusey never gets old. Its existence is so improbable, so absent from the Harvard imaginary— I actually cannot find a single photo of its interior on the internet, only its nondescript 'roof', which is tragically located below a damn staircase. Pusey's invisibility runs contrary to its name, which makes it an easy subject for jokes and puns. In The Harvard Crimson, someone wrote a funny little bit imagining a boozy freshman orientation party happening in its stacks. ("The pungent smell of beer-soaked parchment permeates the air. There is a party in Pusey Library, and the party is pumping"; "You inhale deeply, then proceed to do three shots of some sort of feminist theory.") Pusey is both tabula rasa and imaginative playground.
Yet I went there anyway, precisely because no one did. I never ran into a soul, and was hence miraculously free from chance encounters, social obligations, and hovering librarians. In this ugly, unfrequented bunker of a library, I was relieved of relevance. Even as I rushed lesson plans or procrastinated on pieces for my journalism side-job, encased between stacks of books, alone in study carrels, I was eeriely insulated from social demands and expectations.
Pusey's severe fluorescent austerity was a soundproof escape from the excess of uncertainty I often found myself in— is this my life? How did I end up here? I felt like a ghost, moving through the darkened stacks, motion-sensor lights flickering on and off as I passed by. My body felt fleeting, evanescent, even as my spirit seemed a thousand years old. The whole of Boston could have been wiped out by snow or pestilence, and I wouldn't have known.
Underground, surrounded by steel shelves of sociology, I often felt like the only person in the world.
I don't remember reading or writing anything memorable in Pusey, though I must have gotten things done there. What stands out to me now, in the cavern of my memories, are the white LED lights and how they illuminated my laptop and books and papers in a way that made me feel both half-asleep and unbearably awake.
Solitude in here, I thought, could not get any deeper.
Garishly overexposed, my body artificially induced to phototropic bloom; motionless in mid-movement, preserved— I sat in Pusey as if dazzled, its waiting books about the wider world somehow containing all the hours of my aimless life.
I started haunting Boston Public Library, Cambridge Public Library, and the even smaller, more provincial Somerville Public Library.
"Why??" My graduate compatriots were aghast. It seemed a personal affront to them that Harvard's libraries were in any way deficient, and that anyone affiliated with the prestige of the school should do something so unfashionable.
But after so many years I had become increasingly eager to escape the private university library, with its beautiful, whipsmart people in cable-knit sweaters. Where you needed institutional affiliation to enter, and security guards checked your bag to make sure you hadn't, like some plucky book-thieves before, tried to sneak off with the prized Gutenberg Bible. Where there was always the chance collision of meeting people I knew and having to answer questions I didn't (and still don't) have answers to— "What are you working on? What did you think of Prof. H's class? What are you going to do with your life?"
While the Boston and Cambridge Public Libraries were well-stocked and boasted shiny exteriors, the Somerville Public Library had a shabby, bruised feel that made me feel right at home.
It was small, and might have been a fire station in a previous life. The walls were a monochromatic, non-descript beige. Inefficient indoor heating made the air still and stuffy. The tables were sturdy and scratched. The children’s section had shelves reaching to the ceiling— evidently not child-friendly. I obsessed over old news articles reporting ghostly hauntings in the West branch.
And the patrons— they came with touchingly simple requests, modestly armed with child-like enthusiasm. I remember watching as a little, stooped old lady with flyaway hair approached the help desk.
She clutched her purse bravely. “I’d like to have a book about birds.”
"Yes ma'am. What kind of birds?"
"...just birds."
"From where? North America? South? "
"...North, I suppose."
"New England birds?"
"...just birds."
Here, homeless folks surfed the net and snored in armchairs. Students studied for their SAT and wrote term papers. Old people and harried housewives quietly read Entertainment Weekly and Good Housekeeping, while The New Yorker lay uncreased and untouched. The comics section was always inhabited by teenagers searching for themselves in the gutters between ink and art. Librarians awkwardly asked schizophrenic patrons to please stop muttering to themselves. Paper-skinned seniors frowned behind their prescription lenses, figuring out how to use that infernal printer. Parents brought their kids and lay down on the puce-carpeted floors, exhausted.
It didn't escape me that my search for deeper solitude brought me right back to people. It is a relief, I suppose, that this narrative I am constructing about libraries isn’t just a sad, recursive formula of hopeless, spiraling isolation.
With all that's happening in the world, and the restrictions on travel, I don't think I'll have the chance to revisit these libraries. Their marbled frameworks and brick physiognomies are now part of the latticed dreamwork of my memories. My body remembers walking up the steps to Widener, the self-conscious rustling of a winter coat being shed in the quiet of Phillips Reading Room, the color of the tables at Lamont. These libraries allowed me to flee—further away, deeper into the stacks, below ground— in search for a firmer, more encompassing solitude.
Not that my social life had been populated by a teeming menagerie of people. Depressed and troubled, I became a bit of a misanthropic wretch, resisting the gentle overtures from the friends I did keep. The quest for an even more bottomless solitude in desolate libraries was a false wall for a certain emptiness I perhaps didn’t want to admit, a veneer of purposefulness that structured the resounding tedium of day after interminable day.
Writing this piece, I was struck by how I had, without conscious effort, apprehended myself as some kind of phantom—“I haunted Somerville Library”; “I felt like a ghost in Pusey”. It wasn’t these centuries-old marbled buildings holding the whispers of books that were haunted, but me— some ghoul-like, displaced blighter that kept on returning to the same desolate, run-down places again and again, hoping these well-tred floors and dusty books would remember me.
Was it I who inhabited these libraries? Or do they inhabit me? Sometimes when I’m staring at the blinking cursor, there I am still— hearing the scrape of my footsteps as I open the door at the end of that ghastly tunnel, the echo returning as I finally enter— with relief— into the library of a solitude well-tended.