Back in the dark but bright ages of the last millenium, about twenty years before it all turned into this, when I attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I wandered regularly through the old stacks of Wilson Library. I loved it there. The carrels looked much as they do in the vintage picture I posted — those wooden “desks” had names dug into them, the place smelled old and crackly and musty and as sensuous as the boy I stalked wandering up and down trailing my hands on the books so old, a boy who became my boyfriend whom I kissed while balancing on his lap murmuring murmuring. An old old man manned the desk downstairs an Ichabod Crane, and when the clock struck 11 or was it midnight, he began a descent up the stairs with a giant cowbell that he rang on each floor, warning whoever was there deep in thought in books in browsing in kissing that it was the end of the night and time to leave. We’d march down the stairs, so many stairs, our backpacks full and ready to be examined by another old person a woman, I think, who’d shine a flashlight into our bags looking not for guns but for books, books that we might be stealing from the stacks, books that we’d forgotten to check out. Stumbling out of the huge building, across the wide entrance and down the stairs the grass shadowed the giant oaks and into the night and so much ahead. There was a reading room, too, a magnificent one with long tables and little focused old desk lamps. It was very very quiet, so quiet that when a boy named Hamish came stomping down the center aisle his briefcase stuffed with an alternative constitution for South Africa, his honors thesis, it was rumored, we all looked up and smiled. He was messy and large and white and what did we know of South Africa and apartheid in 1982, years before apartheid was overthrown, intimations in Hamish’s briefcase and the earnest activists who roamed the Pit outside the Student Union with their signs? What did we know about anything?
We had a Reading Day, I think, at some point before exams. I long for a reading day now, a day that I can set aside to just read everything. Then it was the French — Balzac, Camus, Pascal, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Flaubert, the medieval poets — and the English and American poets I devoured — Shakespeare, Stevens, Williams, Dickinson, Auden, Spenser and Milton and Dryden and all the rest. Stacks and stacks of books in the stacks, my legs curled under me on a hard chair, a chewed pencil, all longing and brown eyes. Cast my memory back there, Lord.
Here’s what I’m reading now:
The Town of Babylon by Alenjandro Varela
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Balladz by Sharon Olds
Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick
Apology for the Woman Writing by Jenny Diski
Here’s what I’m listening to:
My first college experience was at the University of Denver and the library there was a vast, modern building sided with mirror tiles that reflected the mountains and I so wanted to love that library, loving libraries as I did and as I do but it was just too new and they had these horrible chairs you could read in that were like half-wombs. I don't know. I was so very unhappy in those days. It was all mostly sadness.
Although I love to read and read everyday, I can't read for more than an hour without getting up and wandering around, doing something. I'm not much of a sitter.
Our experiences of University are so different. I had a four month old when I started nursing school and he was three when I started at University. I can't believe I ever had the energy to go to school and raise a child. And now he brings tears to my eyes when I think of him. His son asked my husband last night if he could be his dad. Fuck the world is hard sometimes.