Dov'e' la Biblioteca?

Ah, how I used to love to get lost in the stacks, especially in the maze of Johns Hopkins’ Milton Eisenhower library, which seemed to tunnel underground even though there were windows, simply because only one floor met the quad and the others were half underground, half facing out of a hill. To arrive at the stacks, one boarded a heaving elevator that went down, down, twenty leagues under the sea. This was back in the days when there were smoking rooms and one could maneuver endlessly up one aisle, down another aisle, through one floor to another, accumulating a great heft of books to nourish the mind while one destroyed one's body with whole packs of cigarettes, vending machine coffee and Zero bars. One could go to the library with only the vaguest notion of what one hoped to learn, say about Thomas Browne’s Quincunxal Garden…and then find oneself meandering down the ever-forking paths of Borges or Eco, one prick of curiosity, one nudge, one aha of sudden insight spurring serendipitous discovery after discovery. One might go to the library as Virginia Woolf describes doing so in Between the Acts, seeking out a cure for tooth-ache of the soul. I think those were the most magical adventures: Not knowing exactly why one had come to the library at all, blind and as helpless as a mole working its way through those tunnels, and then coming across the gift, the life-changing miracle…as though guiding angels had left the book and only book that could serve the existential crisis of the moment and make one human again…or perhaps even lift one out of the human morass long enough to flap wings with the very angel of deliverance who’d swept you up, up and away.

What a drear experience it was for me to spend the day in one of Perugia’s libraries yesterday given how I romanticize such experiences from my past. First of all, humans are not allowed in the stacks at all. One enters the library through a series of mechanical doors reminiscent of that sixties television show “Get Smart.” One door slides open, another slides closed behind. Next one meets a dour woman who a sits at a desk, a ledger open, awaiting your identification number, which she copies neatly in a little box while scrutinizing you between digits to make sure your face matches the “tesera” photo on your library I.D. card. In order to find a book, you must know what book you are looking for and, furthermore, most know how to set up a strand of inquiry in the digital catalogue. Oh sure, it is possible to browse as I did yesterday, as I sought out texts in English on certain aspects of Umbrian life for my students. Problem is: there’s no way to specify “English” in the search criteria. I typed “Umbria” in a subject box and came up with 3, 749 titles, most certainly—obviously—in Italian.

Computers are recalcitrant beasts, subject to bullying freezes and pouty displays of slow down-loading. I am sure I sat wall-eyed by mine, perusing the list for hours, before I came up with two titles to check out: Walter Pater’s Renaissance Art and a monograph by a former Universita’ per Stranieri student on Etruscan dance, never mind that neither title would be in any way pertinent to my course. At this point I merely wanted to hold a book in my hands, smell musty pages, have evidence that there were indeed books in this library.

What one has to do to get a book is: write title and author and call number down on a pink form in triplicate, as well as your own I.D. number and some other codes I didn’t understand which the woman waiting at the desk had to write down for me while clenching her teeth and talking at me as fast as she could hoping that maybe she could discourage me from ever coming back. They were an interesting pair, the two women at the desk. The one filling in my missing codes, choking in a tight lime green turtle neck, her frizzy head of hair squeezing out of it, was all curt efficiency, spouting out rules to all patrons, pointing out forms and where to sit once the forms were filled out. Her pink-turtlenecked counterpart, who could have been a twin who'd straightened her hair simply to contrive a distinguishing characteristic, sat right beside her idly flipping through a ladies magazine. I had almost an hour to contemplate how these women had arrived at such agreement over the dubious distribution of their work load, because I had to sit in a little formica chair at least that long while some invisible soul retrieved my books.

The books did indeed arrive and the green-turtlenecked woman summoned me and explained that I could only check out the one that was published after 1951. The one on Etruscan dance she’d already checked out to me even though I hadn't had opportunity yet to decide whether or not I needed it. She was sending the Walter Pater up two floors to a woman who sat at the desk in front of the “reading room.” She pulled out a huge metal stamper that echoed loudly as she slammed the stamper down on each of the three tissue pages of the forms I’d filled out to request the books. For the Walter Pater, she ripped off a yellow page from the triplicate and told me I’d have to give it to the woman upstairs in exchange for the book and, when I gave the book back to her, she would then give me back the yellow slip…for me to keep in my files for the rest of my life to prove, should the book ever wind up missing, that I had not stolen it.

I went upstairs. I waited a half hour for Walter Pater to meet me there. The woman at the desk in front of the reading room called me even sweetly by my first name when it arrived. I signed the yellow slip and another ledger. The glass room where one can read reminds me of a room in the intensive care unit of a hospital. I spent about 30 seconds in there with Walter Pater, glancing at the table of contents, before I realized it was ridiculous I’d even checked him out: there was not one Umbrian artist listed.

“Sono veloce,” I’m fast, I told the woman when I exchanged the book for my yellow slip less than a minute after having gone through such hassle. “Va bene, Cinzia,” she intoned my name brightly as though we’d been working together all day and would be working together for years and years to come before I’d ever exhaust the possibilities she has in store for me.