FROZEN OUT OF WIDENER

Define reading room. That seems obvious enough, you say. A reading room is nothing more than a room set aside for reading in. Ha, I laugh. Things are never so simple. Sure a reading room can be such a place, but it could just as easily be Lenin's tomb. How do I know this? They kicked me out--they kicked me out of a book-lined room because I sat down to read in it.

I am a student of history. I like old movies, old stories, old styles. I am--and this not according to me--old school. Fortunately, I happen to go to the oldest school for college in America. When a guy with a penchant for bowties needs to write a history paper, he looks for someplace classy to study.

I went to Widener Library. I probably could have found what I needed in Lamont, but I try to avoid the "undergraduate" library on account of its boxy brave-new-worldishness. Modernity is no excuse for ugliness, as far as I'm concerned. Check this out: Lamont is only about five years younger than venerable Houghton Library next door.

Remarkably, Harvard has not gotten around to renovating Widener, though it has overhauled almost every other building in the Yard. The steel that holds it together is still peppered with rivets. The lights have actual bulbs, not the fluorescent tubes we called "death-rays" in high school. And of course, Widener has everything you could ever need for writing a paper--the books reek (literally) of knowledge (figuratively).

But though I dug up a pile of books to sift through, Widener doesn't provide much in the way of study space. The building doesn't even offer e-mail access. I could have situated myself at one of the carrels in the basement in dank air beneath leaky pipes, but I happened to find something better.

In the heart of that temple of knowledge lies the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Room: paradise for yours truly. The walls are made of books--leather bound, glass-encased and reaching to the ceiling. And a giant portrait of the almost-tragic millionaire watches over the Oriental rug and the mahogany paneling with goofy dead eyes.

I spread out my books on the long study table and settled into one of the heavy padded chairs. I rested my forehead on my hand in a very contemplative pose and set to work under the warm light of the study lamp on the table. Briefly.

"Ah, excuse me," came the unwanted voice. "You can't read in here."

I turned to face the woman charged with supervising the otherwise empty room and could only stare into absurdity. I turned my face to the walls of books, so high that a ladder on wheels stood by, ready to assist any eager scholar in finding that dusty volume stuck on the top shelf.

"You can't read?" I asked. "I thought this was a reading room."

"Well, it's a memorial room," she explained.

Oh. (A pause.) For Harry Elkins Widener? Yes. The book collector? Yes. But I can't read here? No.

I reassessed the situation. I had several papers due, and striving as I do for politesse, I did not want to upset this guardian of a dead man's books.

"Do people come in here often?" I asked. Well, some do, she said.

"To commemorate?" She didn't answer. She shouldn't have. She was hardly a policy-maker.

"Nice bindings," I offered as I made my way out the door.

I would say Harry W. had the last laugh, except he's dead. So probably not laughing. But though I'm not sure who won that little battle, I sure lost it. I needed to read for my history paper but didn't get to. I didn't get to because one rich college kid died 70 years ago and more to the point, because someone somewhere still cares. Never mind the fact that the University irreverently uses the sanctuary as a reception venue for presidential fundraising events.

Much of why I chose the Widener room is because it is old. Langdell Library at the Law School is not the obvious failed experiment that Lamont is. Recently renovated, it tries not to be modern and mimics older styles with art deco study lamps and bits of marble here and there. But it's phony: the energy-saving bulbs still give off that wholly-unnatural purplish light and the turnstiles--they speak for themselves. Even without those kinds of mistakes, there's no accounting for dust or all the other details that reassure a person that generations have come before. They have deposited wisdom--which can now be absorbed--and they have departed. It makes a fellow all stoic.

The past, I'm trying to say, can be sustaining. I draw a certain strength from it because, frankly, the dead really do speak in the books of Widener Library. No story is more relevant because its author is still alive; Melville still has a good deal to say although he's been dead for about a century.

What am I talking about? Here's a metaphor: to the Japanese, the highly-dangerous Fugu fish is a great delicacy. Handled and prepared carefully, it can be relished without concern. But the fish contains a fatal poison in its skin known as tetrodotoxin, which can kill in minutes. So it is with our relationship to the past: if we approach it thoughtfully, it can provide a kind of nourishment for our lives in the present. The great danger of history is cheap nostalgia, seducing us into loving the past simply because it is old.

Harvard is old. Older than plastic. Older than the lightbulb. Older than America. It is older than I can understand. "The stock of the Puritans," as the Alma Mater goes. Three hundred and fifty years of history, of people and buildings and dust is a lot to have to deal with. But for all that cumulative experience, Harvard is really only as old as the people who actually inhabit it--they just have the opportunity to listen to the dead. The Widener approach--with a memorial room open for about five non-consecutive hours a day and only made up to look like a place where a person can read--is basically a fear of the past and an unwillingness to confront it head on and ask what it really means.

Really, Widener is dead. Widener's mom is dead. His little shrine is an example of history not used for what it can teach, but history simply as an obsession. Form isn't complementing function-it is toppling it. I mean, the man collected books--presumably he had an interest in their contents. When our sense of the past gets out of hand, the dead, whom we try to remember because they lived and because we like the way they did so, become like museums or antique stores, where children are instructed to keep their hands in their pockets, or maybe just to wait in the car.

I just hope poor Harry doesn't get too upset the next time Rudenstine holds a fundraising cocktail party in his mausoleum.

James Y. Stem '01 is a History and Literature concentrator living in Pforzheimer House. He can currently be found studying in the Cambridge Public Library.