It starts to feel like something is off, that on a visit to a library — not a glass and concrete one, but one built with brick or stone or leaded glass — one should encounter not books, but a traveling exhibition or a diorama about innovation of pre-Columbian peoples.
Still, I go to these old places or make requests of their grand depositories and leave carrying books with actual library card holders with stamps from 1982, 1954. Books with “from the library of _____” still pasted in (and the glue still holds).
I have not once searched for a book that has been checked out, which says as much about my reading habits as it does about everyone else’s. The only books I can’t find are those which are themselves missing, possibly placed on the wrong shelf to lie undiscovered for a century.
Occasional castoffs, too obscure today to keep — Nietzsche in the original, ecclesiastical histories, Chomsky vs Foucault, a first edition Coming of Age in Samoa — are helpfully placed on “Free!” shelves by the entrance.
Walking through the reading rooms surrounded by beautifully bound editions of Carlyle everyone is on a laptop or a phone. No one has a book.
Walking through the stacks I meet no one, except possibly, during study periods, students at a study carrel.
I remember my emotion, as a freshman, upon seeing the library stacks for the first time. My hometown library was stone and leaded glass, but had few books, and had yet to be converted into a place to do photocopying and borrow videos.
Unlike what popular movies teach us, Alexander didn’t weep because he had no more lands to conquer, but wept after hearing a discourse about an infinite number of worlds — a very different type of weeping. I was comforted, somehow, to know that someone so great felt the same as I, seeing the volume of those volumes, more added each day than could be skimmed in a lifetime.