Warning: a somewhat wacky blog post follows. I’m writing on Saturday afternoon in the wake of the news that Joe Biden is the president-elect of the United States. I feel relief—not for a return to "normal" exactly but for a return to feeling itself. It’s a sensory, bodily experience that I curbed over the past four years, curbed to the point that, to my surprise, I almost forgot about it. And then today I remembered: oh, this is what feeling feels like.
It will not seem as if this post is about our class, but it is.
My friends and family are in the US dancing, singing, and playing music in the streets. Here in Ottawa things are more quiet. When I heard the news I looked out at the street on which I live, expecting something. Balloons, cheers, music, something. But it was a day like any other day.
I decided to go for a run along the canal. As I was running I noticed, as I often do, people wearing t-shirts with “The Running Room” logo. And I misread “the running room,” as I also often do, as “the reading room.” I wondered to myself why I always read “running room” as reading room and mused that perhaps I translate one relatively pleasant thing (running) as an even more pleasant thing (reading). That made me think of the library reading rooms I’ve visited over the years for my research. By this point in my run, I was trying to distract myself from the work of running by thinking of good things. I realize that reading rooms are not everyone’s feel-good “go to” but they are one of mine.
Some reading rooms are quasi-public spaces but others are reserved for rare book research. Rare book rooms turn the specialness of the reading room up a notch. Here are photos of two of my favourite public-ish reading rooms: the Bodleian library’s reading room in Oxford, England and the Boston Public Library’s reading room in Boston (the latter library also includes an astonishing mural sequence by John Singer Sargent):
But the reading rooms that I thought about as I ran were not these public reading rooms but rather rare book rooms. Each library has a different procedure for rare book rooms but the general principle is the same: keep stuff out. “Stuff” is all the usual things you might think of as essential for work: computer, coffee, pen, books, bags of any sort and so on. “Stuff” is also all noise of all kinds. Nobody quite says this but there is the expectation that you will breathe very quietly. There is usually either an anteroom or a desk where you sign in and show your identification to a librarian. You’re then given a locker in which to put your stuff (all those things noted about that you’re not allowed to take into the room) or, in some cases, the attendant behind the desk will stow them for you. You’re now finally ready to enter the room. You have only a pad of paper, a pencil, and your wallet. (Some places give you a clear plastic bag to put these things in, others do not.)
As you enter, and the door closes behind you, there is a sudden hush. You have entered a special, protected zone that is like nowhere else. It is a bit like entering a pine forest, the soft needles underfoot absorbing all sound, and even the air seemingly infused with a green studious light. Spurred by my misreading of running room, I recalled these rooms as I ran. I also felt them. That is, by simply thinking about these rooms I could recover for myself the feeling of being in them, of being absorbed by the thinking they made possible.
Rare book rooms are quiet. You don’t hear the ping of phones or incoming texts or media feeds. It is strange and disturbing at first. As I noted, breathing feels like an imposition. It’s true that you do hear the rustling of paper, the faintest scrape of pencils, the occasional cough, and—really—the turning of pages. But these sounds only emphasize how utterly quiet it is.
As I was reflecting on the down-to-earth magic of these spaces, I started to think about designated spaces in general. And in that free-association way our minds sometimes work—from running to reading to spaces—my thinking shifted to hunting season at our cottage. Each year we wear bright orange vests and hats and hope we won’t get shot when we go hiking. But this year, perhaps because we stayed at the cottage so much longer than usual, we got the idea that we should create a safe-space for deer. We bought carrots and a salt lick and declared (admittedly only to ourselves) our property a hunter-free space. And then we waited. And waited. Nothing happened. The salt lick filled with water and the carrots got soggy. But there were no deer.
About a week later I was hiking through the woods, when I suddenly heard a loud crash and a vibration in the earth. In front of me, three deer bounded out of the woods, a blur of white and brown and antlers and thin, graceful legs. And noise. A wild disturbance on an October afternoon that lasted no more than a minute or so. The deer were gone as suddenly as they had appeared and the woods returned to an ordinary quiet (a quiet that, like the reading room, is filled with sounds that only accentuate the stillness).
The deer were heading in the direction of our salt lick and in the days that followed we often saw them there. “We’ve created a sanctuary city for the deer,” my brother joked. As I ran, I thought of the election again, and the ways in which sanctuary cities emerged across the States and Canada in response to harsh immigration measures, and that, while these measures will not change entirely, they will perhaps be kinder in the coming years. But, still, we shouldn’t need to make sanctuary cities to protect animals or people. Another way to put this is: everywhere should be a sanctuary city. And this made me think back to the reading room which is a protected space for books but also a protected space for thinking.
Protected spaces for thinking are hard to come by these days. In general, pings and sounds and distractions have so penetrated daily life that very few of us, myself included, experience the quiet that is so conducive to a certain sort of thinking. We look at our phones. We seek updates to news that we received only minutes earlier. We notice something that looks interesting and we click on that. We click. We click again. You may recall Odell’s distinction between information and context here. We are good at collecting information but less good at understanding why it matters--its relations and context.
And now I am coming, finally, to the way in which this post bears on the course. We are entering essay season now. You have an essay due in this class in a month and you likely have essays due in your other courses as well. You will need to find your “rare book rooms”—those spaces that help you to do your best thinking. It will be different for all of you. We all have spaces that are special. I suspect that for hunters, the entire day of hunting is not dissimilar from my experience of the reading room as a space of heightened attention free from distractions. (And for the hunters among you, I tried to inflect my deer metaphor in a more hunter-friendly way but it didn’t work. I’ll leave it to you, hunters and non-hunters alike, to build on these thoughts and find the images that most inspire you and prompt your writing.)
Think about what spaces most cultivate your thinking and do your best to create them. Try out different options. Experiment. Consider creating a provisional rare book room: a space you enter—with or without a door, it doesn’t matter—that you decide to dedicate to thinking and writing. Think about how to make it your own.
Of course we can think anywhere, but certain spaces—the reading rooms created for us or the rooms we create ourselves—can produce a different texture of thought. And here you’ll have to forgive me, but you knew it was coming by the title: try to create those spaces that cultivate and nourish your brain deer. This essay writing season is a time when you'll want your brain deer to flourish, to roam freely, to explore, to eat and thrive, and, sometimes, to crash through the trees and surprise you with their beauty.
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