Word: loker
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...