Something's afoot in the library
Or the infinite regress of meaning-making
There is a story my family likes to tell about me, one of those oft-repeated threads of family lore shared with outsiders to illuminate some uniqueness of the subject. Or to make fun of them, forcing them to laugh at themselves. This story…or the story that had been shaped and created and then retold became a way for them to narrate me, regardless of resonance. The goal wasn’t fidelity to my person; the goal was to direct the veins of my life into a gushing source of pride, my life reflecting their desired story.
As the story goes, we were attending church in New Hampshire near my grandparent’s home there. I must have been only three or four years old. As it was not our regular church and I knew no one, there was no expectation for me to do anything other than remain sitting with my parents and brothers, carefully ensconced with my family in a pew. Yet, when the children were called forth to leave the sanctuary and make their way to children’s church, I stood, unprompted, and quietly joined the gaggle of children near the altar, slipping into the line that exited the side door without so much as blinking.
In my father’s eyes, the story attests to my fearlessness, my quiet confidence, and my ability to integrate into new situations with nary a worry or doubt. If that is me and those are qualities of my being, then I must admit to being wildly out of touch with myself or to having strayed radically from the path that young being was paving. Narratives shape us as much as they echo our histories and the story of that young girl always leaves me feeling quite adrift amongst the sea of my evolving identities. Was I ever so bold? Or was I merely following directions for fear of not doing the right thing? If so, was I in fact terribly afraid? Was it truly a choice or mere compliance to unspoken adult and community demands? Beyond the binary of those questions lies a larger mystery for me. For—as I watch my small self wandering up the aisle to stand beside unknown peers and inscrutable adults—I see someone already misaligned with the easy flow of routine, asserting individuality not as confidence but as orientation; and from that off-kilter stance came a curiosity to see more…of anything. I see a distinguishing rather than a joining. I see someone more in comfort with separation in her actions than togetherness in shared fellowship with others.
I have never been one of those people with many friends, though when I look back, memory complicates that claim. Few in number, the friends I became close to shared with me a wild and deep way of experiencing the world…and each other. I was part of the small circle of popular girls in elementary school, if there was such a thing. In middle school, all was delirious confusion and the hierarchy unclear amongst the amorphous herd. In high school, I befriended a small group that traversed the nations of various friend groups without falling into the trap of labels: popular, geeky, athletic, drama types; instead we were fluid. In college, I dropped away from a wonderful band of potential friends when the group’s social life reoriented around fraternity parties, and from there through the remainder of my twenties, I remained mostly solitary, but not unhappily so. I use the word solitary here with seriousness and precision. For it was an extreme kind of solitude in which I dwelled. I recall going days, while living in Santa Barbara, without speaking to a single soul, with the exception of my classmates in graduate classes or perhaps a phone call to my mother back on the east coast.
My solitariness was a choice then. Now, as I strive for connection, my separateness is often shaped by living on the margins of a community steeped in wealth and its aesthetic codes. In those younger years, I crisscrossed the cold, barren greens of Dartmouth on my own strange mission for worldly like-mindedness. Little did I know at the time, but such a search is often a sad, if not tragic, charge. Even though I was seeking alignment not with similar people, but rather with a place in the world, the same truth applies. The world does not exist to mirror you, nor does it open willingly to give you a place in it. I did not yet have the wisdom of poet Jane Hirshfield whose daily mantra is ‘to make the unwanted wanted.’ No, not even close. Instead I took the unwanted and excluded myself from it.
On Friday evenings when I wasn’t taking the bus back home, I wound my way up Baker-Berry Library to the sun-splayed Tower Room. If you could nab a large enveloping reading chair by the window on a frigid winter day (which most often you could on a Friday night because…it was Friday night), you could linger in the warmth of the sun’s receding rays while reading and hypnotically opening and closing your eyes, unsure if it was the warmth of the sun or the book that was putting you gently to sleep. At Wellesley College, my solace was the Art History library with its expansive collection of heavy, hard-covered, beautifully photo-illustrated books and its stack upon stack of Art Forum magazines—the only way to access such knowledge, culture, images, or perspectives at the time—where even the ads were an epiphany of a world I wanted so much to be a part of. In Ann Arbor, I would enter Shapiro Library and then wind my way up the stacks where a line of red tape led you through the connector to Hatcher Library—without which I feared—I would end up utterly lost amongst some forlorn section of the Dewy Decimal system. It felt both adventurous and humbling. I was so wonderfully small amidst all of this weighty thought and billions upon billions of words, so many completely foreign to me. I could literally get lost in a library if I wasn’t paying attention. In Santa Barbara, my haven was a tucked-away carrel by a window at the top of the main library whose upper floors jut upwards covered only in pure glass. Here, nakedly exposed and totally hidden, I felt safe to explore ideas and sit for hours that seemed to whittle away at my physicality, the light atomizing me into something also striving upward, until I wasn’t sure where Deleuze and Guattari began and my own uncoiling ended. And afterwards, to escape back outside, the pink light hovering, the smell of salt drifting off the ocean and sprinkling into my hair—baptism back into the softly-lit world. At Columbia, I once again found my sanctuary in a library. Show your ID, descend a short set of stairs, and you could attain entrance to the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library. Into this library, I could never quite relax as I had the others. My discomfort in my PhD program bled out into all of the campuses’ spaces, the me always too much in the way of the pure knowledge I had always released into. Related or not, the distortion of memory lays these two discomforts down together in my mind: my inability to find a home in a library, and the emergence of questions about the isolated life path I was carving, and carving deeply.
Libraries are gracious places, gentle in the manner of true gentility. Of course, they can also be bold places, expansive places. They are full of companionship of a kind that can abate and quell loneliness. There is a reason why homeowners line shelves in family rooms or offices with books—including those they have never and may never read, even fake books—these physical markers crafting a story of a life well-traveled, well-read, and much thought. Books surround us in the comfort of other solitary voices, a joined chorus of those reflecting upon, theorizing, and immersing themselves in known and unknown worlds. Being surrounded by books can feel comforting, but the work of engaging with what’s in them rarely is. True inquiry into ideas, history, and psychology requires confrontation—not only with contradictory truths, filtered narratives, and assertions without evidence, but with oneself. The work I committed to amongst stacks and dust and cracking spines was first and foremost an endeavor of examining my own discomfort—my biases, my blind spots, my defensive mechanisms, and my fears of exposure. Though invisible and carried out in spaces that seemed to promise neatness, the work was messy, painful, and sometimes upending.
So it was that the tactile nature of books continued to reassure me. The smell of books themselves—their fresh or yellowed pages, their metallic ink smell, the welcome dust they gathered or shed as they were left to rest or chosen to be shared, the millions of touches laid upon them by other hands—large hands that sawed wood and supported tired heads, frail hands that washed dish after dish and embroidered countless pillowcases, young hands moist with the excited sweat of being young, tired hands that embrace lightly knowing the fleeting nature of ideas and love—conjures a world, different I imagine for each of us, but for me a world where respectful engagement with difficulty reigns, where the music is of lulling whispers, where we are guided through aisles and stacks to share a thought by a foreign other who may unexpectedly speak the very words you hadn’t been able to find, where thoughts can shepherd our choices, our feelings, our future, our sense of self, and pierce us deep in the center of our trembling hearts, marking us changed. And all of this without the messiness of relationship-slipping conversation, without the awkwardness of undressing before a potential intimacy for the first or hundredth time, without complicated family dynamics, without hierarchical employment relationships, without navigating the want and yet impossibility of knowing any other and the want and impossibility of being known by any other.
In The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, a novel where books, both forgotten and discovered, both as magical solace and inveigling danger, at once carry the plot and the theme, there is a similar recognition of the power of libraries over our senses. The main character Daniel describes his first trip to a secret library in Barcelona, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books:
The moment I stepped into the library, I knew I was safe. It smelled of old books and dry ink, a smell that I loved, a smell that had welcomed me since I was a child.
The smell adheres to memory, tying the personal into the exploration of the other. In The Library Book by Susan Orlean, she ponders what else the smell of books can elicit:
The moment you open the cover of an old book, you are confronted with the smell of…well, what is it? It was the smell of paper, ink, and glue, with the faintest trace of mold. Some said it was the smell of knowledge. Others said it was the smell of time. For me, it was the smell of possibility.
Can you find fellowship with books? I had and I felt a fullness in my life that made human friends seem extraneous. Or so it seemed for a while. I knew my life was both full and tinged with a heavy sadness, but I didn’t mind the sadness for it felt as comfortable as the hidden library carrels I inhabited.
The irony was that I was imprisoning myself in the very place intended to set one free. In prisons, that logic is reversed: within a place designed for confinement, the library often becomes a site of freedom. Prison libraries are well-known throughout fictional and real life stories as being incredible spaces of hope and opportunity for self-improvement. As Oluyọmi Abiọna Awofẹsọ and Olusegun Adebayo Opesanwo state in a literature review on prison libraries in The International Journal of Information, Diversity, and Inclusion:
Information is essential for navigating our everyday lives. It becomes even more critical within a prison environment, as inmates tend to be more disadvantaged and are generally less equipped to address their challenges. The Woolf Report argued that establishing a more effective network of information provision within prisons was essential to developing governments based on humanity and justice (Woolf, 1991). However, providing information is also a prerequisite of any successful rehabilitation program to assist prisoners in confronting their choices and being made aware of the implications of their behaviour. Information can help develop cognitive skills; it is empowering and motivating because it can assist inmates in developing alternative problem solving techniques. An enlarged information base provides a broader perspective for reasoned decision-making and enables prisoners to learn from the experiences of others (Albert, 1989). Information is essential for inmates to be adequately prepared for their release (Stevens, 1995). Access to a prison library can support prison education programs and distance education, enable inmates to obtain educational qualifications, offer career orientation, provide resources for prison educators, and support skills development and vocational training (Krolak, 2019)
But to what use was I putting all the information at my fingertips? How was I sharing the way that information interacted with my mind and my body, my past and my concerns, my associations and maybe even my insights? I was safe from the risk of relationality, but at the cost of divorcing my own interdependence under the delusion that I could exist this way indefinitely.
But in New York, at Columbia, not fitting into a graduate program for the first time, moving amongst but not in the city life itself, living so closely to more people than ever before and knowing fewer, becoming unexpectedly pregnant and closing that door out of necessity, I felt something slipping. It was le manque. In French, the word for to miss, manquer, becomes the noun, lack, le manque, and it was precisely this missing of a lack that I began to have concern over. I think what I was coming to terms with was that the box of isolation I had built so well and so adeptly around my life was small. Sure, I could expand it endlessly with the thoughts and words and ideas and possibility contained and offered in a library, but when I emerged, when I stepped out of Avery and then onto the sidewalks of busy Upper West side streets, my world was there again… and it was small. Lovely and quiet, but so very small.
I should have known. I should have seen more expansively into the record of my own past where my feelings about libraries may have begun. It was the spring of my senior year of high school and, though this is a time when students often relax with their college admissions work behind them and spend more time with friends, for me things were falling apart. Two of my closest friends were dating seriously. The rest of my friend group wanted to spend more time, in and out of school, with a group of people I hardly knew and felt intensely insecure amongst. What had happened to my secure group of friends? Where did I belong amidst the change, the alternations, the new dynamics, the distance and difference? I began to skip some classes where I wouldn’t be missed. And, instead of enduring the deep unease I now felt in the lunch room where I didn’t know where or whom to sit with, I would grab an apple, put my head down as I crossed campus, and sneak into the library, finding a corner where I could attempt to be hidden as I ate, as we were not allowed to eat in the library. That alone, that attempt to noiselessly masticate a crunchy apple was its own kind of torture. Every bite reverberated a noise I thought could be heard throughout the library, maybe across campus. I found deep shame that my existence depended on actual, and not just abstract, sustenance. And there I would hide, until I was forced to attend history class, where I would hunch over, hiding again, and hope I would not be exposed as the ignorant, unworldly, ungraceful maladroit I believed myself to be. In the exact place where legions of words and letters begged that the lessons from their civilization not be forgotten, I was attempting to be forgotten. As it turns out, the way that libraries took significant shape in my life were as hideaways. I was escaping. I was running away. And I was running away from others. Or was I? Wasn’t I really running away from myself?
I am not so sure. I am not sure that the framing of my movement in and out of libraries can be cast as an endless toggle between separation from others and connection with them. Nor do I find it accurate to describe my need to lose myself in their knowledge as an attempt to hide from myself. Indeed, if I were losing myself, shredding apart everything I thought I was limb from hypothetical limb, what was there left to run from? Or on?
We long to make the world legible, but all our attempts end up fitting neatly inside these laughably tiny boxes, manifestly unable to match the incomprehensible vastness of the world itself. Containment of knowledge is a ruse, yet libraries, with their ordered fullness, can effectively persuade us otherwise. Even Borges’ library in all its infiniteness was ultimately a trap. The Library of Babel, though unlimited, becomes recurring. If you continue to travel through it in one direction, you will find “after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder—which, repeated, becomes order: the Order.” It certainly wasn’t this kind of reification of truth that I sought. I wanted to be in the disorder, in the messiness of life, but I was attempting to be messy in a Borges-style “justified universe” where “the universe suddenly became congruent with the unlimited width and breadth of humankind’s hope.” Messiness is situated, but not unlimited. I wanted to find a reflection of the intensely alive way I perceived the world, but I was sequestering my primary experience of that world to a place where I filtered experience and thought only through others, where I did not—in a very functional sense—exist.
The first description of Agilulf in Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight, is of
a knight entirely in white armor; only a thin black line ran round the seams. The rest was light and gleaming, without a scratch, well finished at every joint, with a helmet surmounted by a plume of some oriental cock, changing with every color in the rainbow. On the shield a coat of arms was painted between two draped sides of a wide cloak, within which opened another cloak on a smaller shield, containing yet another even smaller coat of arms. In faint but clear outline were drawn a series of cloaks opening inside each other, with something in the center that could not be made out, so minutely was it drawn.
The design on his coat of arms enacts something called the Droste effect, in which an image recursively appears within itself, endlessly, or as far as the eye can follow. In mathematical terms, infinite regress is a process where each step is produced by its predecessor, continuing indefinitely. “It’s turtles all the way down” is a well-known example of this phenomenon. In Agilulf’s case, infinite regress centers on “something in the center that could not be made out,” a formulation which speaks both to his unknowability—to us and to himself—and his purity.
He is perfectly clean, perfectly jointed, and perfectly articulate. He follows the rules to a T, thinks only in “exact and definite thoughts,” and perceives others only as ideals for which the real persons inevitably disappoint him. He lives with a productiveness that can sometimes resemble genuine existence. Contrast this notion of nonexistence with, speaking humbly from my own experience, actual existence: messy, disappointing, flawed, full of struggle, full of contradiction, painful, passionate, and though guided by rules, not bound by them. And through all of this, we feel. Sometimes it seems as though life, or at least socialized life, is merely putting on a veil between others and our own rawness.
Agilulf cannot experience the range of emotions that existing people can. For example, “his envy for the faculty of sleep possessed by people who existed, was vague, like something he could not even conceive of.” In another scene, “people’s bodies gave him a disagreeable feeling resembling envy, but also a stab of pride, of contemptuous superiority.” He requires order and perfection which, with all of the messy, fleshy, smelly, existing knights, cannot ever be attained. As such, his nonexistence is reified:
The slightest failure on duty gave Agilulf a mania to inspect everything and search out other errors and negligences, a sharp reaction to things ill done, out of place…But having no authority to carry out such an inspection at that hour, even this attitude of his could seem improper, ill disciplined…Every time Agilulf had a moment’s uncertainty whether to behave like someone who could impose a respect for authority by his presence alone, or like one who is not where he is supposed to be, he would step back discreetly, pretending not to be there at all. In his uncertainty, he stopped, thought, but did not succeed in taking up either attitude.
Agilulf can never fully experience the world and, therefore, his reflections remain equally superficial. Yet Agilulf, despite himself or despite his nonself, manages to be incredibly repellant or attractive to others. The other paladins cannot stand his arrogant judgmental way, but Raimbaut, the young palatin, finds him irresistible. Similarly, Bradamante is deeply attracted to his precision and perfection of action.
In the end, though, Agilulf is only a name, obscured by a calculated but nonetheless trivial busyness. Without his name, he disappears fully into nonexistence. Language, too, can perform this double work—preserving us as it conceals—as the narrator writes:
‘Tis towards the truth we hurry, my pen and I, the truth which I am constantly expecting to meet deep in a white page, and which I can reach only when my pen strokes have succeeded in burying all the disgust and dissatisfaction and rancor which I am forced here in seclusion to expiate.
That was the problem I kept encountering: no accumulation of pen strokes---mine or others', in their neat printed lines—could layer over the messiness of lived existence as a form of atonement. I could not, much as I ached to, use intellectual order as moral compensation for the disorder of living. For that is truly what I sought in books, in libraries, in the clear promises of others to explain the world. I was looking to soak in enough knowledge to hold up the ache that kept leaking out into the world, or rather that was continually and infinitely produced by humans in that world. I was trying to define my engagement with the world so neatly that the world could finally release its tightened shoulders, inhale deeply, and cry the flows of tears that it must…truly, it must need to cry seeing all that humans are and do upon its ripening and hardening ground.
What I finally accepted was that to live is to walk in grief. Not sometimes when a loved one passes or after heartbreak, but relentlessly. Intentionally, in fact. The Nonexistent Knight’s narrator tells us that: “One can never be sure of saving one’s soul by writing. One may go on writing with a soul already lost.” Grief is the opening to this space where the world cracks open your soul. Losing it isn’t a tragedy. Losing your soul, living with grief, is where beauty breaks through as Paul Kalanithi wrote in the last paragraph of his book, When Breath Becomes Air, just before he died, speaking to his newborn daughter:
When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.
I was not, as I once thought—as perhaps you have assumed in reading—a version of the nonexistent knight—built of clarity so piercingly thin, it disappears if you try to embody its name. I was, instead, the over-existing night, a being saturated with thick, murky dusk. When you feel this deeply you think, maybe it’s better to hide this away from others. Maybe it is better to separate them from this tenebrous swelling than to inflict upon the world my over-embodied non-existence. Or maybe, somewhere in this infinite library, there is a book to explain it. Or maybe, there is a book I already wrote, one in which I can quietly place my weight on pre-existing words.
That is what I tried for all those years—bleeding silently into words that could absorb endless hemorrhaging. That is what I continue to do—except this time knowing the water will break and then recede—burdening words with weight they can’t carry, until both they and I leak out into the world. It is messier, sure. I have to get up, leave my family, leave the sanctuary even. I have to commit to walking in the unknown. When Ludwig Wittgenstein pondered why our failure to answer abstract questions such as “What is meaning?,” he concluded the problem lay in setting forth a substantive and then attempting an infinite regress towards its correspondence. A turtle upon a turtle will only lead to more turtles. A book next to a book will only lead to more books in an infinite regress where the disorder itself is the point. Meaning does not exist in substance, just as the world rightly refuses us a mirror of the answers we yearn for. I could have done just as well to hide my ache away in a mud puddle. Maybe, with the way you can splash through, with the quiet it holds after a storm, with the way it has nothing better to do than to reflect the light breaking through a retreating sky, with the way it obscures your visage into a watery vibration, perhaps that is more than enough.