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I confess to not recalling book titles, authors, and sometimes
which books I've read. Patrick Süskind calls this phenomenon "a
great forgetting" in a brilliant essay, "Amnesia in Litteris:
the books I have read (I think)," that appeared in Harper's a decade ago. His ecstasy at discovering a marvelous book in his
personal library with intelligent comments in the margins gives
way to a shock of recognition: "As I lower the pen to scribble
my 'Very good!' in the margins, I find a 'Very good!' already written
there ... in handwriting with which I am well acquainted, namely
my own." I went one further: My own marginalia in a book I
was rereading for class was so abstruse that I could not make sense
of it. How easy it is to forget content, yet, oddly, retain a flash
of color from the binding, the feel of the paper--thick stock or
gossamer tissue.
Like a cherished volume, a library and, for me, especially Perkins,
retains something--in the air, to the touch--that preserves the
sweat of past scholars and the dream work of students.
Until recently, I was oblivious to the way Perkins has worked on
me, on my subconscious, during the many years I have known it:
as an undergraduate, from 1961 to 1965, and as a professor of French
since 1980. As long as I have attended classes and worked in the
Language Center, a wing of Perkins, I, metonym for my building,
have felt joined at the hip to the library.
All through last year, construction was rampant at Duke. The deafening
noise was happening around me, but I pretended not to notice. I
had classes to teach and students to advise. I was in survivor
mode. One day I started paying attention. The new library building,
Bostock, attached to the other side of Perkins, sprang up as if
overnight. I collided one too many times with a plywood wall when
I tried, out of years of habit, to drop into Perkins on the way
to my office. The entire first-floor lobby was being renovated
as an "information commons." (It reopened in August.)
Books that have fallen out of fashion were being quietly removed
from Perkins to the annex, a legendary storage facility whose location
is unknown to the uninitiated. The last straw was learning that
the 1948 "levels," for which I have a special affection,
will be permanently off-limits to the public in a couple of years.
I'm in a panic.
It's time for me to bear witness to the changes occurring in Perkins
and ultimately in my own building, for the imperceptible and dramatic
effects of these changes, positive and negative, may well be shaping
our future knowledge and culture. No longer in denial, I decide
to revisit the layers of Perkins, new and old. Along the way, a
sensual and, often, intensely personal geography forms around me.
To orient my tour of the library labyrinth (a synthesis composed
of many visits), I stand facing the Language Center, still very
much a part of Perkins. To the right, a hundred yards down a flagstone
path, Bostock rises, connected by arches and bridges to the only
exterior part of Perkins that has been rebuilt. To the left are
the glass front doors of the 1968 Perkins, where the floors above
the lobby still house the library's main stacks. The oldest wall,
the one with the bas-relief shields above the windows, extends
farther left as it descends in time from 1948 to 1930, ending at
the 1928 tower, icon of the, then, new campus. That corner of Perkins
established the library's authority on the Chapel quad.
The Bostock building both stands out and fits in. The stone on
its façade is almost indistinguishable from the stone of
the Old Chemistry building to which it appears to be joined. I
walk down the path and turn into the first floor of Bostock, a
large intellectual food-court--Current Periodicals, Circulation,
Reserves, computer clusters everywhere, comfy chairs (in two designs).
The spongy carpet sucks up the sound of my footsteps. I admire
the convenient placement of the bathrooms beside the elevators
(before, you went on a frantic search to the far ends of the 1968
stacks) and step into the elevator. I ride in almost preternatural
quiet to the third floor so I can appreciate the Carpenter Reading
Room, Bostock's jewel, flooded with light from tall windows. Students
are sitting in the sunlight with their legs tucked under them,
staring at their laptops. It feels safe here, I say to myself.
Standing in the middle of the Carpenter Room, I gaze across the
way to the new Perkins façade, where a brick tower exposes
its stark black flights of stairs through a series of glass walls.
This architectural feature overtakes the other gray stone towers
and turrets of the library, equal or smaller in height. But the
old 1928 tower rises a floor higher (five floors) and can rest
assured in its ancestral superiority.
I'm ready to move on from the new Bostock and pass through the
new edge of Perkins so I can reclaim familiar territory. The bridge
on the third floor leads me up a slight incline. There's something
romantic about this bridge, as if I am crossing a canal in Venice.
On the third floor of Perkins, I take a turn left into the Tower
Reading Room. Beyond the tables and Duke-blue easy chairs, I find
a fillip of serendipity that brings postmodern and old Duke together
more authentically than carefully matched gray stones. A kindred
soul has wedged a chair, now empty, into a small turret space where
he or she was, for all practical purposes, secluded, yet able to
watch the passersby flowing below. (As a child, I fantasized about
reading in the widow's walk of an old house on the pirate-haunted
Carolina coast.)
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