There isn’t a lot of time for reflection as the spring semester winds down, so thick is the calendar with projects and presentations and heaps of grading decisions to make, but in late April there were some mornings when the cool temperatures and bursting green leaves brought to mind wistful thoughts of a long-ago spring that for me was also defined by the seductive promise of an idealized college campus.
Maybe it was the scent of growing things that triggered memory; in any case, what was left through much of the day was a sort of emotional residue of what particular times of year can feel like, and one that was especially strong because the building in which I work is slated to be closed and torn down, meaning that colleagues are disposing of numerous books.
Cline Library, too, is scheduled for a purge of printed volumes, and it’s hard not to see in these plans a symbol of the blows higher education is taking in these endless-scrolling, impatient, AI-leaning times.
It was different back then, in the final spring of my undergraduate career. I was tasked with researching and writing an undergraduate thesis, and because I had chosen to become a literature major this involved reading. Lots of reading. Deep reading; and in the pre-internet era this meant that I was practically a resident of the stacks. The modernist hulk of the campus library was split into several mid-sized towers, and the lit section was a particularly hushed space, its denizens presumably wired like me to revere the printed word and its quiet study.
I liked it there. My work involved dissecting and comparing two hefty novels, one German and one American, that had been written some fifty years earlier. I was fascinated by how the authors had played with language to convey what back then was perceived as the new hubbub of contemporary life—the speeding automobiles, screeching streetcars, propagandizing radio orators. In the stillness of the stacks I pored over critics’ disassemblies of the novels—the Marxist, the historicist, the feminist, the deconstructionist. I loved how opening a book could be like opening a door to a foreign land, a different time.
And then, when caffeine and curiosity had worn off for the day, I went out into the spring-soft evening in search of my own hubbub. I was 22 that year, full of questions about what life would be, like whether this experiment of rifling the stored knowledge of all those books might be more than a mere spring fling. Would I want to become like the profs in class, with their lifelong dedication to some perhaps obscure literary inquiry?
But more to the point, most evenings I was tantalized by the newly emerging world of adulthood, like college parties, loud music in steaming clubs, an invitation to get high in some acquaintance’s living room, whispered hints of sex. I’d chanced into living in a so-called garden apartment, a term of art that had nothing to do with plants but meant instead that our floor level was several steps below that of the sidewalk. It was a dingy place. My room had no door, and now and again I’d hear the loud sex that housemate Nigel, an exchange student from Britain, was having with a sultry poetry major.
But mainly there was the music. We’d inherited the lease from a friend who had amassed an enormous record collection and as yet had no place to move it to. It consisted of several thousand records sagging on shelves across an entire wall of the living room. The housemate who’d arranged this spectacular setup, John the English major, was an audiophile, so most evenings would find us listening to something right at hand that we’d never heard before: obscure Delta blues singers, one-hit-wonder British invaders, New Wave EPs, Lou Reed’s almost unlistenable Metal Machine Music.
John and I were not musicians ourselves, but he in particular was an avid amateur critic. In twenty years, he said, we’re gonna be having our students listen to Laurie Anderson in our classes, and indeed on my short daily walking commutes from stacks of books to stacks of albums there was no reason to think that these paired repositories of culture would not be the primary sources of meaning to which we’d return again and again, or that we would not always have endless meandering conversations about the virtues or shortcomings of some tangled Dylan line or particular bass riff. And there was certainly no reason to think that everything in the library, and everything on our living room wall, might within a few decades be compressed into unseen digital code.
It didn’t quite work out like we had thought, even though yes, I do teach students in part from books. Our paths diverged. Nigel moved back to the UK, John became a park ranger, I moved west to grow up with the country, a line I’d first heard in a Gram Parsons song in that grimy living room. Life has become both more full and more fraught than I could have imagined back then. But sometimes, when the potential of spring hits my senses in just the right way, it’s like a quick glimpse, half-seen beside a billowing curtain, of what it was like to feel in the future more promise than fear.
