i spent my final semester of college in a library in chicago, learning the role of book cushions and white cotton gloves, among other things. an irksome liberal arts seminar was part of the set curriculum (hours of me thinking, why do i need to know this much about wagner?), and the remainder of the time was our own, rattling around the stately old building, one of few in its neighborhood not to have gone in the fire.
and what i loved there was not so much the slightly iffy political history thesis i wrote, nor the crumbling trial transcripts and propaganda posters and treatises written by those waiting for the hangman, or any of the bits that helped my research. what i loved there was stealthing away to special collections to read rare editions of wallace stevens' poetry. letterpress printings of botanist on alp. first editions of the auroras of autumn. in between statements of judges and ramblings of police chiefs, my notebooks from the time quote also passages like this:
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
.
..
i don't know what ever tricked me into believing that political history was the right avenue for my energy. seriously, what am i thinking sometimes?