by Alizah Holstein
Here are some books that have long been available for consultation on Level 2 of Pusey Library, which is not exactly a library in itself but an underground extension of Widener Library at Harvard. The Erotic Tongue: A Sexual Lexicon; The Erotic in Literature: A Historical Survey of Pornography as Delightful as it is Indiscreet; Eros: The Meaning of My Life; and Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan, and the Question of Ethics.
You might choose a Paris café to read your Foucault, but Pusey Level 2 in fact seemed to me back then, in the 1990s, like the ideal place for Ivy League eros. It was fitting for New England, I thought, perfectly representative really, that scholarship on erotica be consigned to a distant and wholly underground location. In our eleventh-grade French class, our teacher liked to say, “Symbolisme, mes amis,” while we watched Hiroshima mon amour with our eyes peeled for symbols.
At that time I worked at Widener, and it too was rife with symbols. To get to Pusey book storage from the circulation desk, you take a tiny, rickety elevator down to Level D, the lowest level, always empty, which you traverse in dim light, passing incidentally by the Dante section, also consigned (fittingly?) to the library’s lowest rung, and where I also liked to fritter away time. Passing Dante, you push open a set of heavy doors. The wind from the corridor beyond pushes against you, a strong headwind. Which should be noted is a feature of the bottommost pit of Dante’s Inferno—Lucifer, the fallen angel, bats his wings and creates a windstorm, which freezes the water of the lake in which he stands, icing himself stationary, for being motionless is the very definition of Hell, in Dante’s terms, motionlessness being the absence of motion—and motion, of course, is movement, which entails both sensuality and intellect, which when harnessed together, lead to a higher understanding of love and virtue. In Dante’s terms at least.
I always found this deserted wind tunnel between Widener and Pusey a heady space, a liminal place where my physical body felt freed and my mind full of hope and idea. But this might be because when I worked at Widener in the 1990s, I was eighteen, and as a circulation desk employee, I was corralled behind a desk for hours a day. Or maybe it was because real freedom of any kind was still a thing so new that even in its most mundane form—a break from work—it tasted sweet.
Also sweet was the feeling of having a theory. In this case, that Harvard librarians placed the university’s collected monographs on eroticism in Pusey’s moveable stacks because the underground location symbolized their suppressed sexuality, and that that location furthermore was accessible through an obviously Freudian tunnel.
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Recently I read about a few protests that took place last fall semester inside Widener Library. The students entered the reading room as a group and sat down at desks. To the backs of their laptops they taped slogans. For half an hour, they read silently. A few interested bystanders snapped photos. Later, the library administration judged this sit-in to be unacceptable and against library regulations because the protesters, like performers, were seeking attention and thereby creating a distraction. Libraries, said University Librarian Martha Whitehead in a public statement, needed to be protected as places of quiet reflection. As a consequence, Widener meted out minor punishments, such as denying protesters physical access to the library for two weeks. This got me thinking about what happens when we use libraries, when we inhabit them as human beings endowed with mind and body alike. What does “quiet reflection” mean? And in all the time I have spent in libraries, whether as an elementary school student sitting in class circle, or working in them, as I did at Widener, or researching in them during college and graduate school, how strictly have I adhered to the standard of “quiet reflection?”
I offer an example. During my employment at Widener circulation, I began to dream of one of the library patrons, surprising myself, knowing he was just a little too old for me, knowing I had not even yet left for college, and yet feeling that somehow—I knew everything he had checked out, after all—we had things in common. So, when he recalled a book, I made a mental note. And soon, when that book was returned, I wrote a little love note to him and placed it inside his book, which I then placed on the recall shelf awaiting the day he’d pick it up. Recalled books were held for ten days before being returned to the stacks. Each passing day that he did not come in to pick up his recalled book with my little note in it wound the rope a little tighter around my heart. Imagine my distress when I came in one day, checked his patron record and found that the night before, he had come to the library and checked out a different book, but neglected to request his recall. There it sat, for the full ten days, and when it was returned to circulation, I cannot even remember whether my note went with it, or whether I had the foresight to remove it on time. This was quiet, but it was not reflection.
An older Russian lady who used to frequent the library once brought me a copy of Anna Akhmatova’s poems because, she said, I looked like her, and because, she said, I had a poet’s look in my eye. She asked me if I liked Nabokov, and I was too embarrassed to tell her that the only work of his I’d read was Lolita. She told me that Nabokov had been a friend of her father’s and a frequent guest in her home when she was a child. He was quite a thoughtful man, she said. Except when it came to chess. In chess, he was ruthless. I was a very good chess player when I was a child, she said with some measure of pride. He used to let me think I was winning, only to destroy me each time in a few quick, graceful moves at the end. She made a hand gesture as if wringing a neck. HE MURDERED MY CONFIDENCE, she said loudly, making the patron whose books were being checked out at the next station jump. This was reflection, but it wasn’t quiet.
In the months that I worked there, I received gifts from library patrons. Maybe it was being eighteen or nineteen that inspired people to bestow good things on me: mix tapes, dried garden herbs, Chinese money for the dead, Chinese money for the living, rocks from Azerbaijan and Morocco and Angola, a prism, things like that. I made little performances of my own, like reading Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class between patrons, which impressed some faculty members. Although it did not impress Brendan, my coworker from Revere who dressed exclusively in basketball jerseys, who, when he saw the book, he asked me what was the matter with me. I was alright with that; his disdain only enhanced my conviction in my performance. Performing is not quiet reflection either. And yet who among us, in any public space, does not do it?
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