it was six weeks ago that i came to work in the alexander library in new brunswick; alexander is the middle name of my brother, and the name of a greek who conquered most of the known world twenty-three or twenty-four hundred years ago. i was assigned by the work study department to the sub-basement branch special collections. there i met john, a man who works downstairs by himself, and who showed me around. on the first day, he showed me the fragmented skull of a hessian soldier, with its jaw missing. he also showed me various documents dating back to the fifteenth century, and a few ominous looking tomes out of lovecraft, presumably dealing with arcana or hermeticism. one needs a special key to gain access to the sub-basement, and no food or drink is allowed. in addition, due to the sensitive nature of the various documents, a large humidifier drones constantly in the back of the room, behind labyrinthian rows of sliding shelves.
on the first day, i was set to work on sample US voting ballots dating from the nineteenth century. i learned that the communist party has been on the ballot for years, even during the cold war era, and that you could probably vote for their candidate this november, if you were so inclined. it was interesting to see these names from history. richard nixon- the year he won every state except for massachusetts. i sorted college photographs from the 50s and 60s by theme; there were a lot of sporting events, and one day john asked me to do research on the first rutgers crew team, which began competing in 1865.
i guess this is normal; the special collections branch in the rutgers alexander library has an incredible amount of information and history on...rutgers. there is one guy who is writing a book on the history of rutgers football. it's a big deal here; when i was a freshman, i remember the dean saying something about how, centuries ago in the first college football game, rutgers defeated princeton, as if that's something for a rutgers student to hold her head high about. to me, it seemed an utterly flimsy thing to hold onto, the symptom of a spiteful inferiority complex.
but anyway, he is writing a book on the history of rutgers football, and i contemplated asking him about the process, even though it's not a subject i'm terribly interested in. but he passes through the workplace quickly, sometimes shooting me a charismatic smile and saying, "you the man." on the third or fourth day, i helped a friendly man with an unnatural limp ("try not to have a stroke", he advised me) pull apart a few walls. i spent a day moving boxes with a long-haired truck driver who said, "so you work for jerk-face, huh?" (the boss), and went on to give me a run-down of their past confrontations.
but as my time there has progressed, i've gradually realized that i'm not needed, and i've taken to wandering the library throughout the day. this past week, i took the stairwell to what i assumed would be level 2b, above 2a- but as i walked among the shelves, i realized that i was wrong. at certain spots it looks like the aisles could go on forever, like borges' library of babel. i have a friend who rarely talks, and sometimes doesn't respond when i speak to him. i like to think that it's because he is actually in some section of this library, thousands of years in the past.
gradually, i ascertained that i was on the 3rd floor; i didn't know there was one. well, there is. it's where the fiction section is. there is a lot of philip k. dick, including three books of letters that he wrote in the last decade of his life. it seems as though he wrote letters all the time; to his editor, his friends, his children...i thought that it's too bad, for the geniuses and visionaries of our time, that most of them, probably won't have letters to collect, since it seems most people don't write letters these days. or perhaps our time doesn't have any geniuses or visionaries. perhaps they exist but they prefer to keep their wisdom to themselves.
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8 years ago
