This entry is my 26th posting. I am halfway through my journal of the plague year. I haven’t missed a weekly entry, and I’m closing in on fifty thousand words, which means that if I continue apace I’ll have a reasonably hefty pile of pages by March 21, 2021. It’s not often that Fate hands you the plot of a non-fiction novel, and a writing schedule and word count, and the possibility of a happy ending.
Like a lot of paragraphs these days, the one above appears to have some integrity—and even a happy ending—until you inspect it closely. For one thing, I have no idea if we’re going to have a plague year or a bunch of plague years. I have no idea if I’ll be alive on March 21, 2021. I’m planning to be, but a million other people were planning to be alive right now, and they’re all in urns on the family mantel, or reduced to ashes floating down the Ganges, or lying under a headstone with one name on it or many. Fate can, and will, hand you a lot of things besides a plot for a book.
Also, Fate might just be handing you the plot for Volume I. Volumes II-X will come later. Fate might be handing someone else your manuscript, fifty years down the line. That’s what happened to Daniel Defoe’s uncle’s diary. Defoe took what amounted to a family heirloom and used his novelist’s skills to add drama and romance (and, it must be said, a lot of reputable research) to his uncle’s 1665 work. He published it in 1722 as A Journal of the Plague Year.
These are tougher times for getting published than 1722 was. Even if you have a manuscript in hand, and even if it’s reasonably well-written, even if you wrote it yourself, and even if all your friends tell you it’s good reading, that doesn’t mean anyone’s going to publish it. So a likely fate for my own journal of the plague year(s) is that my entries will be printed on acid-free paper, which will be spiral bound between two sheets of durable plastic, and the whole package will end up buried in a university library or found in a box labeled Miscellany at an estate sale.
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When I was an undergraduate at Harvard, I was a work-study student in the circulation department of Widener, the big research library on campus. It contained almost four million volumes at the time, shelved in eight stories, four of them above ground, four of them below. My usual job was to find books in the stacks, even mis-shelved ones, but on occasion I was detailed, with other work-study students, to open packages of books that had been willed to the library.
It was like Christmas morning. Sometimes the donated books were rare and valuable antiques, or first editions from the early Modernists, thrown in among forgotten best-sellers from the first few decades of the 20th century. Sometimes books contained ten-dollar bills as bookmarks, which—as we operated under a monetary finders-keepers system—now and then brightened my cold gray Cambridge winters by paying for a date. Sometimes, stuck between the pages, there were notes-to-self, shopping lists, and love letters. We were under strict instructions to give any personal letters to our supervisor, who would scan them for financial importance and then consign them to the incinerator, whether they had historical value or not. He was a person who had respect for human privacy, even the privacy of dead lovers.
Sometimes we opened individually packaged manuscripts from the institutions we then knew as insane asylums, usually hand printed. Some of them were in manila folders and some of them were beautifully bound. It was hard to read the writing, and hard to understand the words even if you could read them. Reading them felt voyeurish—the people who had written them lacked the kind of filters most of us use to be regarded as sane. That lack had ended them up in a mental ward in the first place, and you couldn’t read their words without feeling like a nosy and unwelcome intruder into a world best kept under wraps.
But our supervisor would take each manuscript, give it a file number (apparently there is a Dewey Decimal System category for the unsolicited and unpublished manuscripts of the insane), record it somewhere in Harvard’s IBM 7000 mainframe, and give it its own punch card. It would be ready to be checked out. As far as I could remember, none of them ever were.
When our supervisor was asked why we didn’t put these sad manuscripts in the burn pile, he said, “These are human lives we’re handling. A lot of these people didn’t start out crazy. They had hopes and dreams just like the rest of us, and these books are all that’s left of them in this world.”
I don’t know how he reconciled his preservation of these journals with his almost religious passion for destroying letters full of affection. I suppose he thought that anyone who wills a manuscript to a library does want other people to consider it a book, one to be read, no matter how embarrassing or inarticulate.
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I’ve been thinking about my old work-study supervisor in these waning days of summer. He had an inherent respect for most human beings, a quality that makes him stand out in memory. He made work-study jobs into tiny lessons in ethics, as when he would lecture us about what it meant to have closed stacks.
Because of book thefts by people who made a living selling library books to collectors, the stacks of Widener were not open to everybody. Faculty could go in, major donors could go in, administrators could go in, but teaching assistants, the people who really needed to go in to research their PhD theses, were barred. They were forced to hand call numbers to work-study students.
We would then go back into the stacks and search through the shelves until we found the requested book. If it was mis-shelved, we returned without it and said it wasn’t where it should be. People who had waited patiently for an hour left empty-handed, sometimes in tears. One of my co-workers made the mistake of making fun of one of them, a young woman who, when she didn’t get the book she had ordered, had screamed at him, called him an asshole, and stomped out of the building.
“These are people under terrible pressure,” my supervisor told us. “For less than minimum wage, they’re teaching ignorant and arrogant little shits like yourselves, and all the while trying to write a book that will someday get them a tenured position in a university. They’re humiliated by the system, and broke, and living in tiny overpriced apartments in failing marriages, and their PhD committees are full of professors who hate them because those professors were once grad students too, and when they were, they hated themselves.”
“How do you know all that?” one of my co-workers asked.
“Never mind,” said our supervisor. “Just don’t keep them waiting any longer than necessary. Be nice to them. If you can’t find the book, look around. It will generally be within eight or ten feet.”
Over time, I got good at finding mis-shelved books. And if I spent a couple of minutes talking to the grad students who had requested the books I was going to search for, I could generally find another book that they also really wanted but didn’t know it yet. They were appallingly grateful.
Only in my maturity have I realized that had I looked more carefully at those packages from the asylums, I might have found PhD theses that didn’t pass their committees, ones that veered from astronomy to astrology mid-chapter, ones that revealed continental drift to be a Zionist Plot, ones that in the end exposed the New Testament and Shakespeare as commie conspiracies.
Come to think of it, some of those packages from the asylums probably contained PhD theses that did pass. You can have hopes and dreams on one hand, and you can have hopes and dreams and bad luck on the other. The last three are a tragic combination, and if you encounter them in the wrong sequence, you can end up having to check yourself into an institution, if you can find one.
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I don’t know how my journal will be read in a few hundred or a few thousand years. Defoe seems a little dated, although he’s not anywhere near as dated as he was a year ago. The Great Plague and Fire of London aren’t as far in the past as they were a year ago, either.
For some time I’ve assumed that if an educated Roman, circa 410 C.E., simply had kept a journal of day-to-day life in Rome, that journal would be a valuable historical document now, mainly because Rome fell in 410 C.E. But as far as we know, educated Romans weren’t thinking they were living in a period of any import. Rome was the Eternal City, and its destruction was inconceivable to them, no matter who was emperor.
The fall of industrial civilization isn’t inconceivable to me, so I’m thinking that if I can finish an additional 26 journal entries and somehow preserve them for two thousand years, I will have written a valuable historical document. The only problem I can see is that there may be no historians to read it, or that the historians who have survived will have forgotten how to read and are instead chanting oral tradition sagas around fossil-wood campfires in the cool-enough-to-live parts of Antarctica.
It’s small comfort that I can write the paragraph above and not be sent packing to an insane asylum, primarily because since the Reagan Administration, we don’t have any insane asylums. But also, most Americans don’t have the sort of faith in their culture that the late Romans had in theirs. It’s pretty clear that divisive social movements, or climate change, or a new pandemic, or a crazed leader with a finger on the nuclear button will bring an end to the America we learned about in high-school civics classes.
I’m sorry, but I have a gloomy sanity about all these things. If writing another six months of journal entries drives me a little crazy, I’ll give even odds that I’ll still be substantially more sane than the person who occupies the Oval Office next spring.
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A confession: I have spent a great deal of my life in institutions full of insane people. I taught writing in colleges and universities to young people who were trying to make sense of their lives, alongside older people who had long before been driven over the edge by their PhD committees or by the ordeal of assembling exhaustive tenure applications.
I like to think that the skills I imparted to my students helped, and that having their thoughts down on paper, in black and white, helped them to see the real world more clearly, and for that matter, to believe that there was such a thing as a real world, and that they shouldn’t attempt a PhD if they wanted to stay in it.
Joan Didion said, “I write so I can know what I think,” and as near as I can tell, that’s true of all of us who write. I hope some of my old students are still writing so they know what they’re thinking. I hope what they’re thinking is mostly in touch with the real.
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What comes to mind now is an unfortunate routine we had at the circulation desk in Widener, back in the day. It may be the passage of time or just the headlines in the New York Times this morning, but that routine has somehow achieved the status of parable.
The circulation desk was three stories above ground on Three East, as I remember, and it was the only unalarmed entrance/exit from the stacks. People who could roam the stacks freely due to a trusted status were numbered in the thousands, and the vetting process had missed a few bad ones, or ones who had turned pure evil upon being awarded tenure. (It happens.)
The sector most distant from circulation was seven stories below us, the basement level of D West. Rumor had it that it was the home of the Cthulhu Collection, but it was also where obscure rare books were stored because it was temperature- and humidity-stable. We didn’t go down there a lot, and when we did it was via the stairs because we didn’t trust the elevator. It was lit by 25-watt bulbs, and usually one or two of them were burned out in each aisle between the ceiling-high shelves.
The bad people weren’t book thieves. Instead, when some screaming assistant professor came running out of the stacks into the heat and light of the circulation department, it was because she had looked down one of those dark aisles in D West and had seen some guy standing there, giggling and mewing, wearing nothing but shoes and socks and a long trench coat spread wide.
We work-study students mobilized with sword-like newspaper holders, a blanket to wrap the guy in, flashlights and a book cart (you could turn the shelves into a prison with one of those parked against the mouth of an aisle). We’d charge into the stacks, run around to the West Wing, send the book cart down in the elevator and rush down the stairs until we reached D Level.
If we found the guy—seldom, because most times he had disappeared into a nook or cranny we had only heard about and were never sure existed—we’d trap him with the book cart, wrap him in the blanket, escort him up and out of the building, and take away his library card. It was the happiest ending we could think of, and at the time and at the age we were, it was happy enough.