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February 21, 2007
In Quest of the Perfect Library (from The Chronicle..)
From the issue dated February 23, 2007
In Quest of the Perfect Library
By ANDREW HOLLERAN
There is a sad truth about college libraries: No matter how attractively designed and cleverly constructed, they cannot disguise a central fact — that the undergraduates in them are seldom there to read books they want to read.
When I walk through the library at Georgetown University or American University, my heart goes out to the undergraduates sprawled under the fluorescent light like animals that have been euthanized. I know that whether they curl up in easy chairs, stretch their legs under long tables, or hunch over desks, nothing can alleviate the ordeal. The reason is simple: Only an adult can walk into a university library looking for a book he actually wants to read.
In a corner of Harvard Yard, there is a library called Lamont, a midcentury, redbrick, functional building whose most recent addition is a strange circular pit with glass walls that show students studying at their desks, like ants in a terrarium, or the virgins the Mayans threw into cenotes as sacrifices to the gods. But across an asphalt path lies Widener.
This enormity was named after a Harvard man who drowned on the Titanic, and its look still exemplifies the turn-of-the-century, upper-class, male WASP coterie with which Harvard was once synonymous. Opened in 1915 with a gift by Widener's mother, it was designed by an African-American architect in a Philadelphia firm that the Wideners had used for their enormous pile Lynnewood, a staggering estate whose plutocratic interiors are remembered today only in photographs since the building is now owned by a Korean church.
Widener dominates its portion of the Yard like some enormous train station — or the post office on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan that the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wanted to make the new Pennsylvania Station. Inside the library, murals by John Singer Sargent flank a marble staircase that leads to a vast reading room in whose shadows the beautiful green shades of reading lamps glimmer like emeralds.
The books Harvard owns outgrew Widener's 50 miles of shelves not long after it was opened, but Widener is still the Mother Church. Forbidden to freshmen, she constitutes a rite of passage when, at the beginning of sophomore year, one is finally allowed to leave Lamont for Widener. Obtaining a pass that allows one into the stacks of Widener means: I am growing up.
Widener is the jungle, the Amazon basin, where any budding intellectual must find gold. Yet 50 miles of books speak of the futility of it all. For one thing, you can never read all of them. For another, other people have tried. So the thrill soon pales.
Sitting in the stacks at some graduate student's desk (or carrel — a new word to the uninitiated!), staring out the narrow window that resembles the slit in the wall of a medieval castle through which archers aimed their crossbows, ennui, dejection, and despair descend, until one realizes one has entered the Sophomore Slump. Yes, getting into Widener may be a thrill, but getting out soon becomes an even bigger one.
Conveniently, there are other Harvard libraries — over 90, to house the largest university collection in the world. The reluctant reader searches for the perfect room, the perfect desk, the perfect lamp, the perfect chair, as if they will make it easier for the literary castor oil to go down.
When they become sophomores, students are expelled from the Yard and sent to live in individual colleges, or houses, near the river. Each house has its own library, small (like Lamont) but atmospheric (like Widener). The Lowell House Library, for instance, looks like the men's club in a New Yorker cartoon, with wood-paneled walls, brass chandeliers, dark tables, and red-leather chairs.
The Lowell House Library is, in a sense, perfect. But it takes perfection to realize a crucial truth about the limitations of architecture and décor. For it was there, one winter night, while sitting in one of those slippery, high-backed, red-leather chairs, that I finished a book called The American Adam — and realized I had, technically, completed this well-regarded study of my country's literature and could not remember a single word of what I had just read. The book had passed through me as a vapor.
So I went up to my room and spent the rest of my college years reading under a low ceiling, with a crummy little lamp, flat on my back, having finally realized I had been searching for something that cannot exist: a library that would read the book for me.
Andrew Holleran teaches creative writing at American University. His latest novel is Grief (Hyperion, 2006).
Posted by schnitzr at February 21, 2007 05:09 AM