There is something tremendously stabilizing about a library.
Really, I’ve never noticed it before, and it is incredibly strange, so much so that I feel as though it must mean something to me, must point me somewhere else, to some goal or career or future. Today I made the mistake(?) of wandering through classroom buildings that I once intricately and completely knew. As I did so, I became more and more disconcerted. I felt haunted by my past self. I felt like I was a ghost returning to a place, to a home. It’s kind of like when you wake up from a dream and you remember the dream and have the impression of its images and ideas on you, but the rational part of your mind simultaneously knows that you are separate from the dream. For a moment, you inhabit both the dream and the reality, but one is more permanent. It’s not like we live in the Matrix or have Star Trek’s holodecks or exist in a world where it is possible to actually live in dreams. We always know they are not real, at some level. But yes, I was entirely haunted and increasingly distraught internally as I walked around.
I realized, to a degree, that some of that wasn’t because I missed classes or missed professors or missed fellow students. It was, rather, because I knew that the person who used to love those things and take part in them and know the place no longer existed. Whether that part of me still exists, beneath the surface, I do not know. It is the feeling of a sadness and a loss of a person—myself. I looked into classrooms and recognized that they were once known and that that person, that learner, existed once, but I—the person now walking in reality instead of in memory—was different.
On a rational level, I know that this is inherent, and the natural consequence, of going to college. The point is to graduate and to work and to change, college being only four years of a life. But the feeling part of me, behind the scenes, in memory, feels the dissonance of present and past as surely as it would feel a discordant note in an instrumental symphony. I walk as a ghost, haunted—not haunted in a bad way, since my memories of Hillsdale College were the best four years of my life. But haunted all the same.
I don’t know how to fix that, actually, or the sort of dull, ringing pain of it. It’s not like where I am now in life or work is bad—in fact it is good. And logical. And yet, as I walked through the classroom buildings, I had to confront memory and loss and the ghost of my past self, the impression of it. I actually still remember very much of the place, of the specific classrooms, of the looks of it with people I once knew in it, things that I don’t think about much when I’m in my work office, on my new schedule, in my new life. All of the memories actually remain though, hidden most of the time.
What does not remain, what does not exist, is consonance of reality and feeling, reality and self. As I look at those places, the past me sees them and expresses the past feelings to my present self, but the present self realizes that the feelings are only impressions, shadows, afterimages. As such, they are actually fake—they do not represent reality. I am not a student. I do not write papers, or sit at a desk, or carry a backpack on my shoulders anymore. I don’t return to a dorm at the end of the day or trek up a hill at the beginning of the day. I no longer have a rehearsed, engrained “shrug” to push a backpack off my shoulders in a classroom; I no longer take pens out of a zippered pocket and maintain a stash of pencils for exams; I no longer have to squeeze on by students in a classroom row that I know; I no longer turn to face a known professor or wait in eager expectation at what will be learned on that particular day. There is so much habitual and yet so much unknown as a student.
Again, it’s not like I learn nothing now, or that I no longer deal with unknowns. But those are the afterimages that I have—that my body feels and knows that it knew—and the dissonance was just really, really too great today. I was a person of a sort, and now I’m not that person precisely. I could try to reconstruct that self—I could audit a class or talk with professors more, and those would not be bad things, even, perhaps even good for me. But I know, all the same, that even if I tried to recreate elements of the past, or enjoy things of the past that can still exist in the present, the past never comes back. My past self does not exist either. It has transformed and changed. And so I walk, as a ghost, through halls I knew and know (differently), remembering and recollecting and feeling exactly as I would have having woken up from a dream. Déjà vu, almost and not quite.
This dissonance, is, of course, quite a challenge. The mind is used to certain inputs equaling certain outputs. Here, I am faced with one input—a bunch of sensory data—but there is a short circuit in my mind. The output—“I am a student and this is what I do”—gets shorted, gets removed and canceled. Again and again, I see and feel something as an input…and my mind gets stopped and has to shut that input down, since it cannot be processed correctly, not yet. My mind and heart do not know how to process this all. They can avoid it; I can avoid it, and have, not even intentionally. Here and there, there are glimpses of memories and everything, of course, given that I live in Hillsdale and work for the College and have stepped in and out of the places before. But to have all of it, and to recognize it clearly enough now that I am able to write of it now, is nevertheless a strange feeling. It’s almost unnatural.
Actually, I think “unnatural” is exactly the right word for it. Nature dictates that input equals an output, that patterns, once established, are true to a reasonable extent. There is always an element of chaos, but we are used to predictions, to causes and effects, or we wouldn’t have such things as meteorology or science. The patterns are broken now. Unnatural, against nature, contrary to my nature (at the basest, most instinctual level, anyways). Instinct and habit in me dictate that something is wrong, and it can make you—makes me—want to be like a horse kicking at a fly, trying to shake off a buzz, a sensation of “wrongness,” of disorder. But I can’t do that. I’m stuck in the discomfort.
And though that is true on the large scale, I, again, was amazed to find that I was driven today to one place I have not been in a long, long, time: the third floor of the library, “Hell.”
The floors of the Hillsdale library go down, not up, so by the time you reach the third floor, called “Hell” affectionately by its students (Heaven is the first floor, Purgatory the second floor), you have entered a quiet, still, cinder-blocked, windowless research haven (or dungeon, depending on your perspective) where some of the most committed—or desperate—students study. I myself never studied down there and rarely spent time down there.
When I did go down there as a student, it was for one of two reasons: to grab one of the American literature books stored there, or to navigate the compact shelving stacks that house vast arrays of old periodicals and journals and thereby doggedly obtain and scan small but magnificent documents as a history research assistant for one of my dearest professors. Figuring out the compact shelves and which switches controlled which shelves always eluded me more than it ought to have, but those are battles that I would undertake now gladly, having realized the significance of what is past and lost.
That’s where I went this afternoon after my brief classroom tour, seeking to remember and to escape memory.
As soon as you enter “Hell,” the stillness gets you. You see all of these marvelous American books on one side, and these massive compact shelving units on the other side. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular—just looking at life and the past, really, in my mind—and stepped into the open rows of the shelving units. Who knows who had shifted the shelves last, and for what purpose? Anyways, I found myself in front of boxes of journals, going back to the 1940s. One line of journals was leaning over, the bookend meant to keep them all upright askew and weak instead, so I tried to fix it, but there was too much weight, and that minor attempt to right the row failed. I didn’t try again, but only made sure that what was there wouldn’t slip further.
I hadn’t held an old book or document for ages, so I just grabbed one—the oldest one I could find in front of me—out of curiosity and opened it and flipped through it.
There is such seriousness to time. Holding a periodical from 1940 and seeing advertisements for products of that period gives a perspective that makes your life and time seem more concrete. The past was real, and real people once read those pages that I now held in my hands and gently turned the pages of, randomly. Those pages represented connection, not only among the various writers and contributors and readers of the journal decades ago, but also between the present and the past, between me and those who came before me. There is something permanent about books that grounds and calms the mind.
It might seem extreme to say, but there can be almost a hallowedness to standing amongst so much history and the reflections and manifestations of so many minds. So much knowledge, so much memory, so much individuality and universality, exists down on the third floor of the library, in those journals and within those shelving units. I distinctly remember feeling that way before on my various scan-gathering expeditions, but I had forgotten that it has that effect on me. The presence of knowledge and the unknown, a vast ocean of it in sheaves of pages, initiates almost a hunger, a flame inside of me, borne of love, I think. At a minimum, it causes me almost to tremble physically at its immensity and out of instinctual wonder. Perhaps reverence is the best term for it, or humility—a recognition of my smallness in history and time, an awe-ful understanding of the infinite diversity in infinite combinations of people past and present.
Having not really gone down to the third floor for any reason, I emerged from it not many minutes later, with no real destination for the remainder of my lunch hour. But that short adventure, only a couple of minutes, into the deep heart of the library had somehow removed, for a moment, my restlessness. They say music can calm the wild beast; perhaps books can tame me.
And I am convinced that in some way, I need to research, write, and create, even if for nobody other than me and for no purpose other than the fact that I can.