From the blank hush of my cubicle, I listen to the library. Someone is coughing, someone confiding plans to a phone. In the cloistered cell next to mine, the sweet sound of a page turning.
As a child, on summer afternoons, I sometimes rode with my father down the hill to his laboratory. He would dissect his newts and frogs, and I would walk under bigleaf maples and dark sequoias to a library of seven floors, to the coolness of the basement and its many books, a permanent prospect of borrowed joy.
Those were the days when people did not think to talk in libraries, and the air kept a silence I could taste inside my spine. I would rejoin my father at the appointed hour profoundly pleased with where I had been, carrying with me sacred space, a way of dwelling.
After college, living at home a month or two, I took a job in the public library next to the Sixth Street railroad tracks, where the clatter of trains and the quiet of words negotiated a broken truce.
Shelving each book, I paused to consider chance details about the author, a rundown on the plot. Then I might see how the first chapter began, and how the second. I am there in the aisle when the locomotive thrums down the street, its whistle calling to get on with the real work, the book still resting in my hands, the hopeless pleasure of chapter three.
Paul J. Willis is professor of English at Westmont College. He is the author most recently of Bright Shoots of Everlastingness: Essays on Faith and the American Wild (WordFarm).
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