Herr Widener

On the days when the work upon my back has weighed like the world upon Atlas, the façade of Widener Library, looming closer with each step, has often seemed to be opening its palatial, ravenous jaws to swallow me whole for untold hours. Other days, particularly in winter when the icy wind rips through Tercentenary Theater and Widener’s windows exude a warm, promising glow, walking into the library is like entering a warm embrace. Whether monstrous or motherly, it is this fickle-tempered friend that has nonetheless been a constant presence in my four years at Harvard.

As with entering any foreign landscape, in those early freshman days I did not feel so comfortable in the impressive marble halls of the cornerstone of the Harvard library system. Reading the sign next to the entrance to Loker Reading Room that sternly stated “Readers only,” I thought I could neither use my computer nor text from my phone. It was easy, then, to understand those who claimed that Widener was too intimidating, or too imposing, to work in. My first time in the stacks, for instance, in a sleep-deprived stupor after a particularly late night, I wandered through the miles of bookshelves for half an hour trying to find my way out, a panic rising within me as images of my body rotting away somewhere deep flashed through my mind.

But despite the terror inspired in that moment and the initial intimidation of “reading” in Loker, I continued to be lured back by such a majestic setting to complete such a commonplace task as studying. In all the hours I have since spent in that library, I have found that Widener demands of its visitors the patience to get to know it, so that its seemingly impersonal character might become hospitable and welcoming.

Widener’s depths contain untold pleasures of both the intellectual and physical variety. The collective shuffling of papers in Loker assumes a calming, background hum, and the chairs in the third floor poetry reading room are perfectly designed for napping. It is easy to find and hold in your hands books that are over a hundred years old. For me, discovering a first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “This Side of Paradise,” one of my all time favorites, in the stacks level 2E was a moment of sublime excitement. And whenever I walk through the stacks and pick up the well-worn books or sit in the reading rooms and work, I cannot help but think of the brilliant minds and powerful people who have walked by those shelves, sat in those chairs, and held in their hands those books before.

During the course of the past year, Widener also came to be the temple of my thesis. The ritual of writing always began with a visit to the replica of Harry Elkins’s home reading room between the first and second floors. As I would cross the threshold of the marble antechamber, I breathed deeply that distinct change in smell, the sweetness evocative of aged pages, and felt the cooler, quieter atmosphere envelope me. In that life’s heart of the library, there the Gutenberg would light up before me, there Harry’s portrait hung above the fireplace, there his books remained lovingly preserved, there stood the vase of fresh flowers continually renewed.

Over entire days spent in Widener in the pursuit of my solitary thesis study, I watched the ebb and flow of people around me, the belly of the beast swelling to capacity in the early afternoon hours, dwindling around dinnertime at six, and emptying by closing at ten. Over the course of weeks, I came to know my fellow Widener devotees by their study habits, their preferred seats, and sometimes by their propensity toward flatulence. And if I found myself in Loker alone at the end of the night, as happened on a few occasions, I took advantage of the chance to fulfill the tempting desire to run, skip, dance through that great long aisle of tables that had always seemed to scream to me for play.

Now that my thesis is done, and I have completed all of my academic requirements for graduation, it feels weird to return to those white marble halls. What purpose do I have there now? It feels like being there will never be the same, and that I have lost something once of importance.

I wonder if, with time, I will forget—my preferred seat in the library, where my favorite section of books is, how it feels to be a student studying through the bitter cold reading period, or working hour upon hour on my senior thesis between runs to J.P. Licks for a free sample of ice cream and a large Earl Grey tea. Already the ghosts of faded experience fill Widener’s halls and surroundings, swirled about in my memory with a thousand other impressions.

I fear that perhaps, as more ghosts crowd in, the definition of my experience of Herr Widener will dissolve. But then maybe I catch a whiff of a smell that calls back those aged books in the stacks, and I remember the touch of their pages and the rustle of papers in Loker and the echo that my boots made walking over the uncarpeted marble floors, and it all feels much closer.

Anna E. Sakellariadis ’10, a Crimson arts writer, is an environmental science and public policy concentrator in Dunster House..