Paul Auster - Invisible

Your family is well-off, but not exceedingly well-off, not rich by the standards of the rich, and although your father is generous enough to provide you with an allowance to cover basic expenses, more money is needed for the books and records you want to buy, the films you want to see, the cigarettes you want to smoke, and so you begin looking for a summer job. Your sister has already found one for herself. She is just sixteen months older than you are, but her interactions with the world have always been more sensible and prudent than yours, and within days of learning that she would be studying at Columbia and sharing an apartment with you on West 107th Street, she set about looking for a job compatible with her interests and talents. Consequently, everything has been arranged in advance, and immediately after she arrives in New York, she begins working as an editorial assistant for a large commercial publisher in midtown. You, on the other hand, in your scattershot, haphazard way, put off the search until the last minute, and because you resist the idea of spending forty hours a week in an office with a tie around your neck, you jump at the first opportunity that presents itself. A friend has left town for the summer, and you apply to fill his spot as a page at Butler Library on the Columbia campus. The salary is less than half of what your sister earns, but you console yourself with the thought that you can walk to and from your job, which will exempt you from the ordeal of having to cram yourself twice daily into a subway car filled with hordes of sweating commuters.

You are given a test before they hire you. A senior librarian hands you a stack of cards, perhaps eighty cards, perhaps a hundred cards, each one bearing the title of a book, the name of the author of that book, the year of the publication of that book, and a Dewey decimal number that indicates where that book must be shelved. The librarian is a tall, grim-faced woman of around sixty, a certain Miss Greer, and already she seems suspicious of you, determined not to give an inch. Because she has just met you and cannot possibly know who you are, you imagine that she is suspicious of all young people-as a matter of principle-and therefore what she sees when she looks at you is not you as yourself but you as yet one more guerrilla fighter in the war against authority, an unruly insurrectionist who has no business barging into the sanctum of her library and asking for work. Such are the times you live in, the times you both live in. She instructs you to put the cards in order, and you can sense how deeply she wants you to fail, how happy it will make her to reject your application, and because you want the job just as much as she doesn’t want you to have it, you make sure that you don’t fail. Fifteen minutes later, you hand her the cards. She sits down and begins looking through them, one by one, one after the other, all the way through to the end, and as you watch the skeptical expression on her face melt into a kind of bafflement, you know that you have done well. The stony face cracks a little smile. She says: No one ever gets it perfect. This is the first time I’ve seen it happen in thirty years.

You work from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon, Monday through Friday. You make it a habit to arrive promptly, entering the broad and pretentious faux-classical building designed by James Gamble Rogers with your lunch in a brown paper bag. Pomp and stuffiness aside, the building never fails to impress you with its bulk and grandeur, but the crowning touch of idiocy, you feel, the greatest embarrassment of all, are the names of the illustrious dead chiseled into the façade-Herodotus, Homer, Plato, along with numerous others-and every morning you imagine how different the library would look if it were adorned with other sets of names: the names of jazz musicians, for example (Fats Waller, Charlie Parker, Benny Goodman), or movie goddesses from the 1940s (Ingrid Bergman, Hedy Lamarr, Gene Tierney), or obscure, barely remembered baseball players (Gus Zernial, Wayne Terwilliger, Clyde Kluttz), or, quite simply, the names of your friends. And so the day begins. You go in through the front door, the heavy front door with its polished brass fittings, walk up the marble staircase, glance at the portrait of Eisenhower (former university president, then the president who reigned over your childhood), and enter a small room to the right of the front desk, where you say good morning to Mr. Goines, your supervisor, a small man with owl glasses and a protruding belly, who doles out your chores for the day. Essentially, there are only two tasks to perform. Either you are putting books back on shelves or sending newly requested books to the main desk via dumbwaiter from one of the floors above. Each job has its advantages and disadvantages, and each can be carried out by anyone possessing the mental skills of a fruit fly.

When putting books onto the shelves, you must confirm and then reconfirm that the Dewey decimal number of the book you are shelving is one notch above the book to its left and one notch below the book to its right. The books are loaded onto a wooden cart equipped with four wheels, roughly fifty to a hundred books for each shelving session, and as you guide your little vehicle through the labyrinthine stacks, you are alone, always and everlastingly alone, since the stacks are off-limits to everyone but library personnel, and the only other person you will ever see is one of your fellow pages, manning the desk in front of the dumbwaiter. Each of the several floors is identical to all the others: an immense windowless space filled with row upon row of towering gray metal shelves, all of them stuffed to capacity with books, thousands of books, tens of thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of books, a million books, and at times even you, who love books as much as anyone on this earth, become stupefied, anxious, even nauseated when you consider how many billions of words, how many trillions of words those books contain. You are shut off from the world for hours every day, inhabiting what you come to think of as an airless bubble, even if there must be air because you are breathing, but it is dead air, air that has not stirred in centuries, and in that suffocating environment you often feel drowsy, drugged to the point of semiconsciousness, and have to fight off the urge to lie down on the floor and go to sleep.

Still, your shelving missions sometimes lead to unexpected discoveries, and the cloud of boredom that envelops you is momentarily lifted. Chancing upon a 1670 edition of Paradise Lost , for example. It is not the original printing from 1667, but very nearly so, a copy that came off the presses during Milton’s lifetime, a book the poet conceivably could have held in his hands, and you marvel that this precious tome is not locked away in some temperature-controlled vault for rare books but is sitting out in the open in the musty stacks. Why is this discovery so important to you, why do your hands tremble as you open the book and begin scanning its pages? Because you have spent the past several months immersed in John Milton, studying Milton more closely than any poet you have ever read. During the tormented spring of Rudolf Born, you were one of several undergraduates enrolled in Edward Tayler’s class, the renowned Milton course taught by the finest professor you had all year, attending both lectures and seminars, carefully plowing your way through Areopagitica, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes , and a host of shorter works, and now that you have come to love Milton and rank him above all other poets of his time, you feel an instant surge of happiness when you stumble across this book, this three-hundred-year-old book, while making your lugubrious rounds as a shelver in the stacks of Butler Library.