Unreal City

Widener under construction is a fantastic world. Predictably monumental in summer, the building takes on an imperial quality against the pale blues and violet greys of a winter sky, perpetually half-scaffolded like a Christo installation or the Sphinx.

Like all construction sites, the library is fascinating in its assemblage and disarray. Concrete and glass are shored against future crises of construction or history. Of course, it's hardly the largest project around: beyond Cambridge, the Big Dig spills into campus life by means of odd detours en route to the North End and Hadean holes surrounding the airport.

But unlike the rest of Boston, whose Norman Rockwell qualities have gradually given way to human landscapes, my mental images of Widener have become daguerrotypes, gauzy and greyscale. A shot of the pillars at night, spilling down and across a frozen Yard. A slow panning of the benefactor's full name carved into stone. The inviting wasteland of snowy steps. A clump of visitors posed longingly or curiously on the very top step, taking photographs of each other.

These images fall against ones from this past semester: the metal bird straining against the sky. Large windows boarded up or lit through odd hours of the night. Naked lightbulbs illuminating empty stacks. A figure disappearing suddenly into one of the side entrances.

In deference to what seemed like epic construction, I had avoided venturing in to the stacks for several months, skirting the blocked Yard entrance and gazing up at the huge crane. But I couldn't stay away long. My Cabot-stocked shelves were not enough: I dreamed of books with titles like "Aspiring to the Condition of Language: An Examination of Aesthetic Considerations in the Aspect of Structural Principles to Musical Problems."

One early evening near the end of reading period, I was crossing the yard from Emerson to Grays Hall when a woman passed me in the opposite direction en route to the T. (Perhaps an opening piece for "Women in Ancient Societies: An Illusion of the Night," WID-LC HQ1127.W63?) As I redirected her, she explained her disorientation. It's the Widener renovation, she said: it completely turns you around.

Completely? I was intrigued. The next day I set off with an ostensible list of call numbers as if fulfilling a Yeatsian prophesy.

Entering the library, expectant, it seemed at first as if the previous night's promise had been a bit overstated. The way to Pusey and back was exhaustively labeled in visually arresting orange. And despite some disconcerting piles and xeroxed books, I was happy to see the decimal system work its usual magic.

And yet it was not so simple. At times like these distance, and not direction, is my downfall. I find it nearly impossible to walk purposely past telescoping rows of books, leaving them all untouched, unread, unopened. (Glimpses of Portuguese periodicals, Byzantine manuscripts, journals of learned societies and "Iron Maze: Western Intelligence v. the Bolsheviks".)

Walking more quickly in an effort to distract myself produced an almost dizzying effect. On each row, a title or two would snap into relief, barely able to be resolved by the dutiful memory before the next row was at hand. At irregular intervals, the heady stream of words would part to reveal curious eyes turned suddenly upward from the desk, beyond their appointed carrel, deep in thought.

("Metaphoropolis." "Unveiling the Arctic." Something in demotic French.)

Circuitousness aside, the only real signs of construction were occasional wires, missing patches of ceiling, holes in the wall. I hardly noticed this, instead considering familiar platitudes: what is an unfinished wall compared to the deeply unfinished project of knowledge it contains? Though if the wall remained unfinished and the book unbound, who could continue? Likewise, the very effect of construction in Widener and Boston is an eerie sense that the city, far from acknowledging my presence, is in fact dutifully primping for someone who will come later, perhaps much later. If I did get lost in Pusey it was only for a moment--a sudden placelessness. Books successfully in hand I allowed myself to follow a sudden lead: a sign pointing to "Geography." Hoping to find shelves of the world in relief, I followed instead a series of plastic signs to an oversized shelf headed by a large blue book. Setting down my stack I found the book was an encyclopedia of imaginary places: the perfect topology.

A reminder that, when all else has come and gone, the surface of the imaginary remains infinitely accessible.

The homeward hour: I returned thinking of books unread. "Comics und Religion: Eine Interdisziplinare Diskussion" shares this mental shelf with "Illuminated Pages of the Codex Amiatinus." But turning up the road towards Lowell in the early dusk I saw its facade lit up like a storyboard: numberless lighted shelves in which my classmates read, gesture, change clothes, argue and disappear.

Maryanthe E. Malliaris '01 is a mathematics concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.