When I was a rather new student at the University where I first naively sought Enlightenment, a mere Idealist devoted to the pursuit of esoteric knowledge whose dimensions I could not remotely grasp, whose complexities I could only vaguely anticipate, whose truths I did not yet dare question, I devotedly spent long autumn evenings secluded in the Main Reading Room of the Graduate Library. Utterly impervious to the titillating pleasures discovered by my fellow students as they ambled across the campus hand-in-hand in pursuit of new love, I was engrossed in the impenetrable arguments of an obscure philosophical text. Oblivious to the red and yellow Beech and Elm, Gingko and Frangipani leaves of that fading season fluttering down from branches outside its gothic walls, I ponderously read the sacred document, word for word, line by line, over and over, futilely trying to comprehend its meaning. With my head reverently bowed and precariously supported by nearly numb arms planted on one of the many long polished teak tables of that enormous hall shielded by broad beams of its awe-inspiring cathedral ceiling, I pretentiously sought secrets that were oh so slow forthcoming. And for some unknown reason, I endured, week after week. Somehow, I had finagled a coveted pass to that sanctuary from a graduate assistant with whom I exchanged my dorm meal pass for a month, to eat instead at Scotty’s, a cheap burger and dog stand downtown, while I still examined dense commentary on the philosopher’s murky passages, before I returned to my reserved seat in that hallowed chamber.
One night deep into that semester, after long sequences of such meditation, I unconsciously looked up across the study table to encounter two intense black eyes staring at me with amused contempt. “Was I an itinerant trespasser, a homeless intellectual vagabond intruding where I did not belong, or just an innocent wayward fool of some kind?” they seemed to inquire. I stared back, blankly, for my eyes, yawning brown in sunlight, glowing hazel in the moonlight, were then reddened from the weariness of intense reading and took more than a moment to refocus on human shapes and their inquiries.
“Hello,” he said, rather more friendly than I expected.
“Yes, hello,” I answered uncertainly, not knowing what else to say.
“You seem rather serious for an undergraduate intruding into our sacred domain.”
“Undergraduate? How do you know I am an undergraduate?”
He simply smiled. I later learned he knew every graduate student who used the library’s resources, their assigned seats, and the topics of their investigations.
“Well, I find the seriousness here conducive to study.”
“You know there is a rather good Undergraduate Library next door where I believe you actually belong. There’s even a comfortable reading room on the top floor frequented by honor students.”
“Yes, I know, but most students there seem more interested in each other than in the books they pretend to read. They spend their time whispering coquettishly to one another,” I said defensively. “I like this solitude.”
“True enough. But do you presume to some higher aspirations than general undergraduate comprehension?” he gently mocked.
“I suppose I do,” I answered somewhat apprehensively, afraid that he was about to expose me to the literary authorities of the place, not knowing he was one of them.
“And what is that you are reading so intently, my friend?”
Was he interested or just ready to ridicule me? I hesitated, looked him over, tried to read his intentions. He had a head of cropped short blond hair with a premature trace of gray on each side, a broad clean face, sharp nose and chin that would have made him seem somewhat handsome, were it not for his hunched shoulders, curved spine, and awkwardly short arms. He gave off a monkish appearance of a sequestered scholar, quite out of place in a room full of young, well-dressed, and affluent graduate students in their tweed jackets, white blouses, and thin blue or pink V-neck sweaters. For that reason, I was indecisive, then realized I had no recourse except honesty.
“Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason,” I mumbled, somewhat embarrassed by my obvious over-reach. I had spent hour upon hour, week on week, trying to decipher the structure of his “Transcendental Apperception” in an elusive attempt to trap the post-Aristotelian, non-Substantiality of the “Self” that he sought to prove stood unseen as synthesis behind all events we experience, but whose phantom presence forever seemed to escape me like shadows of memory projected on the dusted white screen of my personal history whenever I looked for it.
“Ah, I should’ve guessed, Philosophy, that absurd rabbit hole of intellectual futility,” he laughed.
“I think it’s more serious than that,” I tried to rebut him in defense of my intended Major. I was only taking “Introduction to Philosophy,” a large lecture class taught by an animated Medieval Scholar of some note. “At least I can’t reach such a conclusion until I’ve given it much more study.”
“Why start with one of the most difficult books?”
I said nothing. The truth was that I had heard of Kant and simply had seen the word “Reason” in his title and reasoned it must be important. I thought I could cut corners and get to the heart of the philosophical enterprise. After all, I had read some Plato and a little Aristotle in my high school Philosophy classes. I’d heard that Kant was pivotal. Why, I had not a clue, certainly knew little of the challenges to him via Descartes, Berkeley, or Hume who had awaken the august German thinker from his “dogmatic slumber.”
“Suddenly mute? Indeed, you must be a misguided freshman.”
I stared menacingly back at him without answering.
“In that case, you should know that you’ve barely begun to make your way through the ‘100s,’” he said enigmatically.
“Pardon?” I had no idea what he was talking about.
“The ‘100’ section of the Dewey Decimal System around which the volumes of this library are organized.”
“Well then, at least I’ve started near the beginning,” I played along.
“You have a long way to go. You’re actually only on the ground floor in the Reference Room, where there is a little of everything,” he added. “Eight floors still to traverse. Can you make it in four years?”
“Probably not. But this is where they keep commentaries on Kant, in Reference. Maybe I’ll just make it to the 200s. Who knows?”
“Ah, the 200s, that’s Religion, Faith, the antithesis of Rationality. If you are headed that way, why waste your time here?” He had a way of challenging me that made me mad.
“The number system seems reversed,” I retorted. “Religion should come first, at least chronologically. But Rationality supersedes Religion and seems to be the foundation of modern Civilization.” I thought myself somewhat informed on the subject, a prima facie argument for my behavior.
“Says who?”
I hesitated. “Says all of Science, says the Law, says Higher Learning itself.” I felt confident in my answer, at least at that moment.
“Perhaps you haven’t noticed a glaring lack of Rationality in our current world affairs, not to mention the century of slaughter we have barely survived? Wither Rationality in time of war, which seems to be all of the time? Wither Rationality in recurring famine amidst our ungodly and selfish affluence? Wither Rationality amid the ceaseless waves of personal hatred and jealousy that turn Brother against Brother and Sister? Wither Rationality when Democracy promotes the mass Idiocy that seems to reign supreme across the political landscape? If you’re not looking for religious awakening in the 200s, then you’re better off headed for fiction or poetry in the upper levels. At least they have no pretention to salvation. They are hidden up on the eighth floor.”
“Well, you’re quite the cynic,” I shot back. “Is Rationality not residing here, at least,” I replied, “at the core of all these volumes?” I dramatically flailed my arms about in a circular direction at the glossy wooden shelves filled with books of all sizes, from all eras, covering all sorts of fields, volumes that I could never hope to read this year or all of my years in the University.
“Ah, a true devotee to the philosophical tradition. So you’re going to stick with the 100s. Not a bad stab at your defense, though.” He smiled. His lower teeth were somewhat crooked. “All right, you can stay for now. And perhaps if you behave yourself, sometime I will take you on a tour of the upper floors of the ‘Stacks’ so you can see how far you have to go to gain a well-rounded ‘Liberal Education,’ to be the ‘Renaissance Man’ you are aiming to become.”
I later learned the “Stacks” were the countless rows of crowded bookshelves above the open first floor leading all the way up into the Clock Tower where the most valuable volumes of the University’s “Rarest Book Collection” were protected. Only professors and select graduate students were allowed in the “Stacks.” Normally, students were required to sit in the Reading Room and submit individual book requests by their “Call Letters” found in the Card Catalogue so librarians or other graduate employees could carefully retrieve them and bring them down for examination or check out.
“And who are you who would grant me such an honor?” I arrogantly asked. Was he toying with me, I wondered contemptuously.
“Roland Clovis, Assistant Graduate Humanities Librarian. And this is my domain. I’m the one who issues permission slips to sit here for novices such as you.” He stuck out his short right arm with a chapped white hand. “With whom do I have the pleasure of scholarly combat?”
I introduced myself and confessed that indeed I was a wayward freshman. He grinned at my honesty, slowly turned, surveyed the room, and walked away with a slight limp to assume his watchdog position on a tall swivel seat behind a raised reference desk guarding the entrance to the “Stacks” and paid no more attention to me that evening, although he always politely nodded whenever I entered or withdrew from the Reading Room in weeks and months to come when I appeared after classes or dinner. The Reading Room was open until midnight, seven days a week, although on Sundays, it didn’t open until one in the afternoon.
Autumn retreated to early winter. I took the Thanksgiving break to go home for the first time since late August and returned to the disturbing scene of prolonged battles between my newly-divorced parents who gathered once more, mostly for the sake of my younger high school sister, and to endure their cross-examinations as they sought to discover whether their hefty tuition money had been wasted, as they presumed it had been on my idle studies, rather than some boring commercial business or professional preparations. At least the turkey, mashed potatoes, and tender asparagus sprinkled with almonds were a genuine reprieve from the cardboard roast beef and tasteless oatmeal of my dorm cafeteria. Two days later, I returned to school on the same ten-year-old Greyhound that had ushered me home, to write a number of five-to-ten-page final term papers, take blue book exams, and watch my first semester end with a string of four “As,” in Philosophy, World History, English, and Astronomy, and only one “B+,” in badminton and bowling from the required Physical Education curriculum intended to make America’s youth stronger and better prepared for what? The next war?
I figured I would avoid my parents’ distress by skipping Christmas vacation at home and hid out for twelve vacation days in my deserted dormitory room, high up on the seventh floor, gazing out across the University and dull lights of the small college town when darkness fell after four each afternoon. Both libraries, Undergrad and Graduate, which I could see on the far side of the campus, were closed for the break. But I could hear the Graduate Library Clock Tower bell chime away each hour, a lovely sound, I thought back then.
Christmas, of course, was a bleak affair, sleet and freezing rain, the ball fields of yellow grass fading from dirt brown to scattered white, the bare wet trees that lined fraternity row turned funeral black, no presents from Santa. Old Saint Nick must have figured the dorms were deserted. Nothing from my family, the dorm mailroom was closed. A present came when it opened up again in January. I gave my folks a morning call and told them I missed them, asked my sister about her boyfriend to embarrass her. My mother cried a little. I had never been away for Christmas. Fortunately, the dorm cafeteria was shut down too. I ate popcorn and coke for breakfast, took a long walk around campus, the gyms were closed so I couldn’t play any ball, my other passion. I spent the afternoon reading a Greek History textbook for a class that I had signed up for second semester. (I had already given up on Kant on page 277 for a while.) I took a nap and then, after reading some local sports pages about the upcoming Bowl games, decided to venture downtown to find someplace open for a square Christmas dinner. At least I figured I’d get a good turkey sandwich.
Darkness was closing in as I walked the mile across campus to the legendary Gables, the only close place open that holiday evening. The old soda shop where jazz great Bix Beiderbecke once played trumpet to Hoagy’s ragtime piano back in the 1920s had become a bar and grill. Someone told me Hoagy wrote “Stardust” there. Could be. It was usually packed with drunken fraternity brothers and their sorority princesses. But the food was always good. That night it stood depressingly deserted since almost all the students were back home. I walked in anyway and took a table by the window where I could watch cold rain embroider the empty avenue with oily silver-blue stains sparkling under a foggy yellow streetlight. After I took off my leather high school letter jacket, I glanced over at the silent jukebox and decided to play “White Christmas” just for a joke. On the way back to my table, I walked past a row of mostly empty booths. Then I heard a sharp voice.
“Is that the wayward philosopher?”
I wheeled around. I already knew who it was before catching sight of him in the shadow of the last cubicle. “Mr. Clovis.”
“Get your coat and join me. Christmas is no time to eat alone.”
I wasn’t really in the mood for company but suspected loneliness was a terrible disease, and he evidently was suffering from it, as was I. “Sure.”
I can’t remember what we talked about at first, lots of shallow humor and witticisms, no doubt about holiday cheer and White Christmases. He insisted I buy more than a sandwich and graciously paid for my turkey and mashed potato dinner, with cranberries. He was drinking Irish whiskey with his meal. I thought of that old George Thorogood ballad, “When I drink alone, I prefer to drink by myself.” Maybe not. They would have carded me if I had tried to order the same. Anyway, I’d had a couple of beers back in the dorm. I do remember the conversation slowly took a more serious tone. He cross-examined me about my background, my family, my friends, my goals in and after school, why I wasn’t home for Christmas. I was as vague as I could be, for a while.
Eventually, his interrogation broke me down. I confessed to my isolation, admitted that I was indeed too serious for my own good. And under his further psychological probing, I admitted to trying to escape the rituals of first-year social initiations, that is, that I was too shy to try my luck with any of the pretty young co-eds who glided about campus. And there were plenty of them. I kind of resented his persistence and at some point even wondered if he was trying to pick me up or something, especially after he revealed some of his own vulnerabilities, something I didn’t expect, and at first, wasn’t all that eager to hear about. It was my own fault. I tried to deflect his questions with my own.
“What about you?” I’d finally got the courage to ask.
He hesitated. Faculty and staff aren’t supposed to reveal too much about themselves, especially to undergrads. But he’d had two whiskies while we sat together, and probably at least a couple before I got there. He said he’d been on campus for almost two decades, was a kind of exile from his ecclesiastic aspirations. “I spent my high school and early college years in a Monastery down South, miles from nowhere.” I detected slight traces of a Southern accent.
I found out he’d been a brilliant but errant student under the strict disciplinary routine of austere Monastic authorities. “They tried to teach me obedience by sticking me with mundane and meaningless tasks such as peeling potatoes, washing stacks of dishes, cleaning their small rooms, and damn toilets, before I was allowed to return to the consolation of my reading and prayers each evening. I hated some of them who tormented me, especially Brother Mathias.” He took another drink.
It turned out he had an almost photographic memory and had memorized much of the Bible by the time he was through with his high school routine, and Brother Mathias, a sadistic pedantic, and perhaps pederast, I guessed, resented that more than anything. But to Brother Martin, the elder cleric, Clovis was a prized young scholar who could bring distinction to their Order. Brother Martin gave him free reign of their small library of sacred texts, many of its volumes in Latin, which by his last year there Clovis knew fluently, along with Greek and German. Unfortunately for him and his hopes for the priesthood, he stumbled upon a forgotten Latin volume by the Roman poet Lucretius, hidden on a top shelf of the library, stuffed in a mislabeled box.
“De Rerum Natura, ‘The Nature of Things.’ Have you read it?”
I said I’d heard of it in my high school Philosophy class. That was about it.
“Lucretius was an admirer of Epicurus, the Greek contemporary and opponent of Socrates and Plato. Unlike Plato, an Idealist who posited a theory of Absolute Ideas for the Forms of ‘The Good, The True, and The Beautiful’ in a higher reality, Epicurus was a radical Materialist who reduced everything to Matter in motion. And, as far as the Church was concerned, Epicurus was an enemy of all religions.” Clovis rattled off a line of Lucretius in Latin, then translated for me, “Humanity is crushed under the weight of Religion.”
I kind of agreed. “Heavy. When did he write that?”
“First century B.C. De Rerum Natura was an explanation of how everything that exists is ordered matter, not by the gods and their generosity or vengeance, but through the random combination of tiny, invisible Atoms, and that over an Infinity of events, all things are created and destroyed, time and time again.”
“Wow. He knew about Atoms. When was that?” I was impressed.
“Before the reign of Christ. Amazing isn’t it? But it was theory, not empirical science,” which came sixteen centuries later.
“Still, pretty astute.”
“Lucretius wrote that all religions seek to manipulate and terrify us with fear of punishment in some nebulous afterlife, but that in truth, we have nothing to fear from the gods, because they don’t exist, and that we should seek tranquility and resignation in the impersonal laws of nature, of which we are a part and always will be.”
I was enthralled by his Latin quotations, and intrigued how it all affected him. “When I read the lines of Lucretius, I instantly saw how everything I had previously been taught and believed was the result of Divine Design, could better be explained by dispassionate physics. Epicurus and his Atoms created the intellectual framework for modern science, for what we call scientific knowledge!”
I nodded and listened carefully. I knew I’d have to read Lucretius for myself.
“I saw the Light,” he shook his head. “But it was not the Sacred Light that struck down Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. Epicurus and his Atoms provided a more compelling and obvious account for the universe than some invisible religious Spirit or the Holy Trinity that had shaped my life up until then. I yielded to Ockham’s Razor, the simplest explanation.”
He called for another whiskey, then fell silent for a moment. I ordered another Coke.
“That must not have gone over well with the Brothers,” I half-joked.
“The text that I secretly translated from Latin in my small room when I was supposed to be engaged in prayer elevated the level of Doubt that I had hitherto repressed into utter defiance. I was ruined, even before my illicit literary excursions were discovered and deemed Heretical by my elders. I was denounced by Brother Mathias, who, suspecting something strange was going on with me, searched my room and found the volume behind my metal bed. He knew enough Latin to read the title and knew what it contained. He was both shocked and gleeful that I was guilty. So I was expelled from the Order that had guided my spiritual education for almost a decade. I was cast out like a venomous demon. I was only twenty-one.”
All I could say was, “Gee, I’m sorry. That was cold.” He downed his third or was it sixth glass. “Did you return home?” I asked.
He had no home. His father was in the military overseas. His mother had disappeared when he was young. In exile, he made his way to our University because he had a cousin in a sorority here, but she was about to graduate and leave him alone again. He stayed, worked weekends and summers for tuition, then got a scholarship. Within four years, he earned his Ph.D. in Greek and Latin Studies and in another two years in Religious History, plus an MS in Library Science in an additional year. For a while, he taught part-time in the Classics Department and lectured in Religious Studies. But tradition is that you move on to some other college to start your academic career.
“I didn’t want to move on. I loved the serenity I found here, the beauty of the place. Luckily, I was offered a position on the University library staff, a non-academic appointment, and have worked my way up to Assistant Director of the Graduate Library’s Humanities Collection, the closest thing I could find to a monastery.”
At first, I thought his sad story made his apparent hostility toward Philosophy much more understandable, since it had ruined his life. But he wanted no pity, or so he said.
“I guess ultimately, it was for the best,” he quietly claimed. “For here I am in what Leibniz ironically pronounced the ‘Best of all Possible Worlds,’ not the ‘Real Secular World,’ of course, but our ‘Idealistic University World.’ It is comfortable and enlightening. And I meet people I like, fellow seekers, so to speak.” He smiled at me rather oddly. I guessed he was plenty drunk by then.
I nodded. I was a refugee myself, at least then, but I was caught off guard by his honesty and afraid that he wanted me to openly sympathize. I wasn’t into sympathy back then, except for myself. He became quiet and that unnerved me. So I rather stupidly asked him if he had gone to Church that day. After all, it was Christmas and he had been raised in a Monastery.
He laughed softly and confessed, “Yes. I guess, ultimately, I still find more comfortable answers in Religion than Lucretius can give me, even if they are false. I’m not a scientist. Nor am I satisfied with his explanation of Spirit or Soul. They seem so different than mere Matter, even though they may have emerged from Matter. I’m a Dualist, Spirit and Matter. Plus, I came to see the tragic limits of ‘Reason.’ In the modern world, ‘Reason’ and science have fueled as much military destruction and human suffering as they have created invention and human comfort. Besides, it’s hard to shed old habits. At least I’m not enslaved by the Priesthood. I am a free Spirit. All explanations are flimsy guesses.”
I was surprised. I had been brought up Catholic, too. It haunted me sometimes. Yet I had fled from its dogmatic answers. That’s why I was pursuing philosophy. I was, with Lucretius, a witness to endless creation and destruction of personal dreams and refused to give in to religious superstition or fear of damnation. Back then, I disdained Religion, at least Western Religion. Yet, in high school, I had been sort of enthralled by the Theosophists, Madame Blavatsky and all of her mysticism, which I later learned really came from the unified consciousness of self and Self in the Hindu Upanishads, and in America, by way of Emerson and the Transcendentalists. I was confused. Then I opted for Philosophy.
“What about you? Church on Christmas?” he asked hopefully.
“No, I gave up Church last Lent,” I tried to joke. He didn’t smile at that one. “Faith and Reason clash as far as I can see, and as I said the first time we met, I am a Rationalist, if not a Humanitarian or something. Still searching.”
“Well, does Science subsume Religion, or Religion subsume Science? Anyway, keep searching,” he advised. “I won’t tell you what to believe. That’s why you’re here, to discover Truth for yourself.” That was generous of him. I could see he was a good man, a learned man, a tormented man, but a kind man.
When we finished eating, he surprised me again with an invitation to walk two blocks over to the Graduate Library. “I have a key, of course, the key to knowledge,” he chuckled as he limped up the hill on which the two libraries stood silhouetted against the raw night.
We approached the large, darkened limestone structure built back in the 1920s, its only illumination coming from the round white face of the large clock on its Romanesque tower. Almost ten o’clock, I remember it read. We’d been talking for several hours. The building’s steep red-tiled roof glistened in a steady rain that was changing to light snow as it got colder. We entered through a back door used for deliveries. He punched a few numbers into the security alarm system, and we walked up the back steps and wound our way into the Main Reading Room that dimly glowed with a few low-power night lights. I had never seen it so dark or so completely deserted. It felt spooky, just the two of us, the empty tables, and thousands of books lining the walls, floor to ceiling. I thought maybe they were secretly communicating with one another in a silent language of the dark. I thought I could hear their wisdom bubbling up from the stillness. It was like we were disrupting a holy séance.
“Follow me. I’ll show you the ‘Stacks’ and something even few Graduate students get to see.” He pulled a flashlight from his coat pocket and we walked up another set of old wooden stairs behind the reference desk, stopping at each floor to note its contents while he uttered a few words of commentary. He told me there was a metal elevator for the book runners who retrieved the requested volumes, but this was the only way to reverently ascend through all the dimensions of human knowledge. I followed him without saying much.
The second floor contained the Philosophy section, the 100s that I read on the book bindings, a more complete collection than on the main floor of reference books. “Here’s where I assume you’ll waste most of your time these next few years,” he humored me. “I recommend you start with Plato’s Republic, rather than Kant.” I didn’t mention that I was scheduled to read it the next semester in my Political Theory class with Dr. Sorenson.
“‘I walked down to Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon, son of Ariston, to make my prayers to the goddess.’” I looked at him inquisitively. “Plato’s first line of the Republic, Socrates speaking,” he told me. “Plato is setting up Socrates’ inquiry into Justice in the State and in the Soul.” I was flabbergasted. “Nowhere does that Dialogue tell the reader, and you must learn on your own, that Glaucon was Plato’s older brother.”
“Really!” I smiled in surprise.
And he did that with each book he touched during his tour, scores of them, quoted lines that someday I would read on that night’s recommendation.
“I guess you won’t be too interested in the religious volumes on this floor, the 200s.” I said nothing. We climbed another flight of stairs to the third floor and the 300s, Social Sciences. “Democracy in America by Tocqueville,” he mumbled, “Veblen, Schlesinger, the Economics of Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, plus Education, Horace Mann, John Dewey and so forth.” We passed through them as though they were nothing but popular prejudice, although he stopped here and there to quote. “Free public education is one of America’s great gifts to the world,” he asserted.
“Then how come I have to pay so much tuition?”
“Good question.”
On the fourth floor, we quickly walked among the 500s, Mathematics, Euclid, Archimedes, Bertrand Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, the Pure Sciences, volumes on animals, badgers, wolves. He stopped to pull Ridgway’s Ornithology of Illinois. “This is worth an afternoon or more up here,” he commented. He pointed out the 600s, Medicine, Health, Technology. “The Technocrats,” he said with a sneer, “one day they will run everything, and know nothing.”
We ascended to the fifth floor, Arts & Recreation, oversized books on painting, photography, music. I caught sight of some titles in the shadows, Greek sculpture, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Van Gough, Picasso, Warhol. I wanted to stop, look, listen to what he might say, but he pushed on past some Library offices.
The staircase became narrower as we approached the sixth floor “Stacks,” the 800s, Literature. Here we stopped for more than half an hour while his hands, whitened from all the bleach he had been forced to use for cleaning toilets in the monastery, glided over the essays of Thomas Merton, who he knew by heart. “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” He smiled. “Love is our true destiny…. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.” He looked at me again and smiled. I felt uneasy. Then he passed on to Emerson, “Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self…” He turned to me. “Good advice, no, even from a Philosopher?” Then he pulled out a volume by Proust, “Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” Then Balzac, “Love is the poetry of the senses.” And Flaubert, “The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.” He knew by heart all those French Masters, names I only vaguely heard of in high school, but one day would cherish.
He led me by the sleeve, over to the long shelves of English, American, French, Russian, Iranian Poetry. His hands caressed the outer bindings as he repeated their names, Shakespeare, Milton, Robert Herrick, quoting wildly, drunkenly, as he limped forward. Finally, he stopped at Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, Fitzgerald’s translation, and pulled it from the shelf. “At least you’ve heard of this one?” he chided me.
I nodded. “Yes.”
Without cracking the cover he said, “I know it is only December, but listen to the wisdom of the poet. ‘Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring, Your Winter garment of repentance fling, for the bird of Time has but a little way to flutter, And the Bird is on the Wing.’” I’d heard of the poem before in high school, but had never heard its verses recited so lovingly. I can never forget that stanza, as I hear it now in the echo of his voice.
“We could spend all night here, but ‘the bird is on the wing,’” he pushed the volume back into its snug sleeping place on the tightly packed shelf. I saw why they call them the “Stacks.” We ascended to the seventh floor, History, the 900s. That’s where I expected he would tell me something about the civilizations that rose long before ours, perhaps along the Indus River so he could lecture me on the Vedas or maybe retell a legend from Ur. But, no, we walked past old paper-bound accounts of our State when it was still Indian Territory, past the Congressional Records going back into the early 1800s, past the biographies of U.S. Presidents, the personal papers of Adams to Roosevelt, a shelf devoted to Lincoln.
We passed the volumes on Russian and European wars and empires until we reached the rear wall of the seventh floor and a locked door. He removed a skeleton key from his pocket key ring stuffed in his brown corduroy pants and opened it to reveal another set of steeper, narrower wooden stairs that led up into the Clock Tower room. He pushed aside some low-hanging, bare electric wires with a volume of Tolstoy in his hand. They gave off a spark and I jumped. “Careful! Don’t touch them. They are dangerous hanging down like this. But paper doesn’t conduct electricity.” He tapped Tolstoy. “The University is going to renovate and rewire the entire library this summer. The building could be closed for three months. I don’t even know if librarians will be able to get in. I may go to Europe, Rome, of course.” I ducked and avoided electrocution. We ascended the last few stairs.
“This is what I wanted to show you.” We had arrived at the end of the stairs, where he opened another gray metal door that led into a small room in the tower, carpeted with thick, old, and worn Oriental rugs, a heavy, brown, cracking leather couch, and two green, stuffed leather chairs. A couple of 1930s oil paintings of the nearby National Forest, streams, and fields filled with sunflowers were squeezed between floor-to-ceiling shelves. The back side of the tower clock lit up one side of the room. I could read 11:35 backward on the dial.
He turned on a green shade lamp. Then he went over to the fireplace and flipped a switch. Artificial flames flickered over fake logs, and then a spark surged up on the thin, bare wire behind. The lights dimmed for almost half a minute, and then the flames resumed. “Once this was a real fireplace, but that was too dangerous. They got rid of it in the 40s. Still original wiring, but it gives off the appearance of fire and actual heat. On cold winter nights, this is the best place on campus to read. Those wires are a problem they’ll fix this summer.”
“Cozy,” I agreed.
“Yes. This is the Rare Rare Book Room, the public Rare Book Room is in the back of the first floor. You’ve seen it. This one contains volumes of which there might be only a handful of copies in the entire world. Only the veteran librarians are allowed here and a few senior scholars and professors. I spend a lot of time in this room. Sometimes I even sleep on that couch.” I was more than impressed as I followed behind him while he pointed out three display cases.
“Here’s one of the original State Charters of 1816,” he gestured. I looked closely at the ornate ink handwriting and the official State Seal. “Here’s a copy of one of the first French maps of the Mississippi River, 1671.” It was amazing how inaccurate it seemed. “And this is an original copy of Tom Paine’s ‘The Rights of Man,’ 1791.”
“Amazing.” Of course, I was dazzled, almost speechless.
“They should be under lock and key, but so few people know of them up here. They’ve been safe this long.” He jingled the keys in his pocket.
I pretended to zip my lips.
It was plenty warm up there. I was tired. I examined the books on the old shelves while he walked over to a desk and removed a half-finished bottle of Chivas Regal 25 from the bottom drawer. “How about a Christmas drink with me?”
My father kept good whiskey around the house, so I knew what he had. “Why not?”
“To friendship,” he toasted.
“To knowledge,” I replied.
His eyes were bloodshot and his speech slightly slurred. I felt a little uneasy drinking with University staff. But he wasn’t Faculty, so I figured the rules might be a little different.
“Sit down,” he pointed to the couch. I did. He downed another glass and then put the bottle back before he walked over to the far wall and pulled down a small metal box from the top shelf. “This is what I want to show you.” He opened the container and removed a yellowed book with a faded paper cover. The title was in a hand scroll, written in Latin, De Rerum Natura.
“That’s it?” I managed to gasp.
“Yes. I guess I should give you the real story. After Brother Mathias took it from me and told me he was going to burn it, he left it in his room and went to report me to Brother Martin. I broke in, stole it back, and fled the monastery. They expelled me when they discovered what I had done. But I was already gone. They ordered the local police to search the bus station and arrest me. But I had hitchhiked out of the county headed north. Eventually, they found out where I had landed, and they sued to get it back. But I had crossed state lines, and I hid it in a safe deposit box in a bank in the next county for a couple of years. They couldn’t trace it and eventually gave up. I hid it in this rare book collection five years ago. I found out the details of what happened at the monastery after I left. At an academic conference in New York, I ran into a former fellow student who graduated the following year. He’d become a professor of History at Yale. I told him that they had lied, that Brother Mathias actually had burned it and that’s why I fled. I think he believed my lie.”
Clovis sat down beside me and ran his small fingers through its brittle pages. He halted, closed his eyes. I thought he had blacked out. Then he opened them and read a passage in Latin, and translated. He went on for a long time, and it was getting late, and I was becoming drowsy. I remember, his voice changed, became deeper and quavered as he quoted Lucretius. “It’s easier to avoid the snares of love than to escape once you are in that net whose cords and knots are strong; but even so, enmeshed, entangled, you can still get out unless, poor fool, you stand in your own way.” He smiled at me and asked, “Isn’t that profound and lovely? Am I standing in my own way?”
I didn’t reply.
“I’ve never really shared this volume with anyone before. It’s been such a lonely journey for me.” His voice cracked.
Things were so much different back then. A deep kind of fear separated different kinds of people from each other in all sorts of ways; blacks from whites, white from blacks, men from women, boys from girls, young men from older men. And at that age, what did I know about the deeper mysteries of existence? I was just finding out. Some people hated others for who they were what they were. I never hated anyone. But I was no saint either. Sometimes I was often thoughtless and thus cruel when I never meant to be.
He put down his beloved Lucretius on the couch on his other side, the ragged text he had saved from the flames of the fearful Monks. Tears shaded his eyes. He looked at me for a long moment. He was so drunk. He closed his eyes again. I held my breath. When he opened them, he looked at me again, then put his hand on my knee.
I couldn’t believe what was happening. I froze. I didn’t know what to say. Fear shot through me like an electric circuit surging through bare wires. I knew I liked girls. I had a girlfriend at home, a pretty girl and smart, two years younger, or I had before I left for school and she started dating someone else, some footballer. I was so confused. I admired Mr. Clovis, I really did. I had found him fascinating, an intellectual hero, really. But that was all. That was plenty. But not enough. I leaped up.
“I’m really tired. I think I’m almost drunk. I’m sorry. I got to go. I got to go.” I didn’t even look at him. I just bolted through the door, rushed down the steps, across the seventh floor “Stacks,” and then down the creaking wooden staircase we had climbed, floor by floor, into the basement and out the delivery door where we had entered. I heard an alarm go on, then shut off when I slammed the door. I didn’t look back except once. I saw the light of the Clock Tower, 12:37. I walked rapidly, then ran for a while, exhausted, moved away as fast as I could the rest of the way back across campus now white in the day after Christmas snow.
Who was I running from? He couldn’t have been behind me. I took the elevator up to my dorm room, locked the door, and sat in the dark. “Why did I act like that?” I asked myself over and over. “Why did I have to insult him that way? I could have just said, ‘That’s not my thing.’ And after he’d gone out of his way to be so good to me? To try to help me. Or was he just setting me up the whole time? What will I say when I run into him again?”
I kept cross-examining myself, drank two beers, opened the window to let in some cooler air as I watched the snow swirl, and lay down on my narrow bed. I listened to the Library tower bell finally strike two. I thought I almost fell to sleep, shallow, restless sleep.
Then I heard it, a dull subconscious sound at first, and then it became a distant alarm. I thought I heard sirens. Half awake, I stumbled to my window overlooking the campus. The sirens became louder. Fire engine sirens. I looked across the campus toward the Graduate Library and saw small flames jetting up through the red-tiled roof. A horror gripped me. I jammed on my gym shoes as fast as I could, grabbed my coat, and ran, and ran, and ran, slipping on the snow, falling, getting up, running. The sirens screeched louder and louder the closer I got. I swept through the woods in the center of campus and came out on the other side to see the entire top floors of the Graduate Library consumed by flames.
“He’s up there, help him, help him,” I screamed at the first fireman I saw. “He’s up there in the Clock Tower room. You’ve got to save him.”
“Who is?”
“The librarian, Mr. Clovis. You’ve got to save him. He sleeps in the tower room.” I was crying, screaming hysterically.
“God help him if he’s up there now. Maybe he got down. Get back. I’ll tell the Chief.”
Just then the large white scorched face of the clock tumbled out of the tower and crashed to the ground leaving an ugly round hole in the upper wall. The tall Romanesque tower was crumbling, leaning to one side. Then I saw him, standing in the opening where the clock had been, his arms spread out, his clothes and hair on fire, but not a sound from him, like a martyr at the stake. Could he have seen me? He couldn’t have. But I felt he had. I knew he had. He was holding something stretched out in his right hand. I heard a loud crack. The tower floor beneath him gave way, but as he fell back into the flames, he tossed it from the gaping hole where the clock had been. A light wind fanned its flames as it fluttered to the ground. I broke through the police line that was keeping the small crowd that had gathered away from the firemen. The book was all flames as it hit the snowy ground. I stomped on the half-burned volume of Lucretius, fell to my knees, picked up the crumbling hot pages. They burned my hands. I pressed the singed volume to my chest against my coat to smother the remaining fire. More than half of it was gone. He was gone. He was gone. And I knew somehow I was responsible.
“Damn wiring, it’s ancient,” I heard the Fire Chief swear to one of the police officers. “We gave them an order to fix it last summer, but they appealed and put it off a year. That’s what it had to be, God Damn wiring.”
“Yea. what the hell good did all that book learning do for ‘em?” the cop muttered.
R. Craig Sautter is author, coauthor, editor of 11 books, including two of poetry: Expresslanes Through The Inevitable City and The Sound of One Hand Typing. His short stories have appeared in Deep Overstock, the Chicago Quarterly Review, Evening Street Review, Catamaran, Neon Garden.