Heading for Hilles

The past few evenings have found me wending through the Radcliffe Quad and up Garden Street. I do not live in the Quad, and have always, in the past, cast a pitying eye on the Quadlings who have insisted upon a Quad-River rivalry—feeling that the River’s patent superiority spoke for itself—but I have been studying in Hilles Library lately. This is the sort of peculiar habit you admit to with an abashed smile, like an affection for listening to ABBA records while binging on Sun Chips and Fresca. In a nostalgic age, it is the rare indulgence that is passé without having quite acquired the mass following to be retro.

I am not blind to Hilles’ faults. It has water-stained carpets, an exhibit space that has no exhibit, an unpopularity amongst undergraduates so decimating that it has a post-apocalyptic feeling. But I love Hilles— the way it looms, bright-lit, above you suddenly as you leave Garden Street, its layered staircases as complex as those in an Escher engraving; the way the low-slung Scandinavian Modern chairs bear mismatched cushions, piled in quixotic efforts to render them more comfortable; the way that you can claim entire floors for yourself—an impossibility in densely-peopled Lamont. I love that someone had a modernist vision so complete that the furnishings and even stacks echo the architecture. I love that this vision was not entirely practical. Officeholders mosaic their sterile doors with photographs in an effort to humanize them. Librarians look cowed by the empty space surrounding them. For the Scandinavian Modern chairs’ part, there is a bruise on my spine from a collision with one of them; I wear it like a badge of honor.

But I had long loved all of this about Hilles without feeling obliged to make the long, chilly nighttime pilgrimage to the Quad. What prompted my recent peregrinations was the news that Hilles would soon undergo renovations, collapsing the collections to a single floor to make way for some as-yet-undefined space for undergraduates. Suggestions have included a student-run coffeehouse, although Cambridge could not be said to be suffering from a dearth of Starbucks.

Lose the penthouse, with its buzzing juice machines? Condense the airy floors of stacks? Take down the hanging panels to which are very occasionally pinned art exhibits? It was this vision of a new, more efficient Hilles that has driven me up Garden Street night after night to the old, empty, water-stained Hilles, to wind my limbs around those unaccommodating chairs. Last week I ascended an echoing staircase to the penthouse. (I justified the excursion as a study break: Both of my legs, which I had draped over an arm of one of the chairs, had fallen asleep). There, on the top floor of the library with the lights of duplexes and of the Quad shuttle glinting below me, I found myself alone in the company of soda, snack and coffee machines and expanses of linoleum. “This is creepy as hell,” I said aloud, just to hear a voice. I was sorry when nobody told me to be quiet. When I descended again, letting the heels of my shoes clatter in the stairwell to dispel the quiet, I felt both relief and sorrow, as one does when retreating from a sheer but dazzling precipice.

When this Hilles is gone, replaced by a prettier, more efficient version of itself—a sort of Stepford Hilles—there will be precious few places like it left on campus. I realize, of course, that retaining a shrine to impracticality is—well—impractical. But I had long thought of Hilles as a refuge among Harvard libraries. The guards at Houghton all but frisk you when you emerge from viewing its rare books, Widener is haunted by scowling academes, Lamont is crowded with a Boschian assortment of your drowsing or deadline-crazed classmates—but Hilles remains a place apart, the ex-hipster aunt whom you seek out at Thanksgiving because you know she alone will refrain from asking you about how school is going and exactly what you plan to do after graduation, anyhow.

Harvard makes a business of expelling the inefficient, the dated, the impractical. The endowment is a notable beneficiary of this efficiency-mindedness; so too is the student body, admitted on the strength of its ambition, hustled out on leaves of absence when their grades dip. There is nothing really wrong with this. An affection for the go-getter is what makes Harvard so quintessentially American, and what makes it so Harvard. But if there is not room at Harvard for impracticality, then there is at least room to mourn it. And so spring will find me on Garden Street, heading for the Quad’s doomed, lovely library.

Phoebe Kosman ’05 is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column appears on alernate Mondays.