‘Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life’, wrote Annie Dillard, and I still have no idea what she meant, even though I thought about it at length.
I came at 10 am, and before I noticed, it was evening. While packing my computer and books, I was wondering, how a day could run by so fast? A morning is always a promise. The promise of how much you will do and how much you will enjoy it.
It was in the Karin Boye library of the Humanities department, so I dove into an anthropology reader. I dissolved in it. The hours might have been ticking away, but I wouldn’t have noticed. I was there, with those strange, unfamiliar people, I was a stranger there, and I awed at my own courage. I will never have the courage to become an anthropologist, I thought sullenly, emerging from the book. Come back to reality. You are who you are; you are timid, squeamish, indifferent, and cowardly. Face the facts.
But I am an observer, a tiny voice squealed. I am an accomplished listener. I am perceptive. I am complacent, I am benevolent. I love being a stranger, a foreigner, an outsider. And I am not indifferent, I am curious. But no-one seemed to listen to the tiny voice, and it faded away.
The library is quiet, but not silent. I hear the steps and voices hushed by books and carpets. I hear rustling pages, but I see no-one; I am hidden behind bookshelves. I look around. I am sitting in what looks like some Greek cartographic section, with piles of what looks like ancient maps, lying around casually. I pick up one of them. On closer examination it turns out to be not a map, but some ancient photographs of more ancient hand-written texts in Greek. I can read Greek, but I don’t understand anything. I put the volume back. In front of me a poem by Karin Boye stands printed out and inserted into a plastic holder: Jag känner dina steg. I understand enough of this poem for my heart to squeeze, and to beat faster, and for shivers to run down my spine, and all over my body. This is one of those amazing poems of the invisible, the undertold – not told fully, partly concealed. This is one of those poems where you don’t know whether it is a love poem or an ode to the divine, one of the best poems.
The day promises so much; but now it is gone, it fell into the bottomless gap of the past. Not gone fully though: a girl from my anthropology class taps me on the shoulder, and when I leave, I give her the books and have a small chat; I walk in the darkness to another library to pick another book; I find in that book a check-out notice in the name of another girl from my anthropology class, who I like a lot. It is a type of serendipity that makes me smile inwardly. I should find her on Facebook, I think. Unable to resist the library temptation, I settle there, by the wall of glass reflecting the brightly lit rows of shelves. I still have the evening, where I will speak to my fiancé on the phone, and read, read, read to sleep.
