The most frequent question I have gotten this semester, after a year at the U of Pittsburgh, is "are you glad to be back?" The answer is of course yes, but then the question is often about much more. When grad students and undergrads pose the question, it seems to be a conversational, checking-in move, something more interesting than "how's the semester?" But when colleagues ask it, they seem more than casually interested in the answers. This is because the seemingly innocent question is wrapped around other, deeper questions, questions that keep them up at night and are at base versions of the same one: Tell me why my job isn't so bad. Tell me why one could possibly move back to the flat midwest, to a quasi- wannabe city town after living in a real city with people who have jobs at places other than the university, the school system, or the hospital. A city with a Whole Foods, for crying out loud. With hills and water. Why?
Of course there are loads of answers to that, and I've trotted out most of them in these conversations the past few months. But the one I keep forgetting about, the one that I nearly cried at the thought of leaving the first time, the one I signed on to write about today, is our library.
I've been gathering materials for my new chapter, and as with the other chapters, it has sent me to sources old and new in countless other disciplines. And dammit our library has them all. I've only needed to request one obscure little item from interlibrary loan, and that arrived as a .pdf in fewer than 36 hours. I just saw a new book advertised on the back of John's Monthly Review called The Fiction of a Thinkable World. The description makes it seem important for one of my current project's aims--to work through how the body-mind "problem" manifests in political, intellectual, and rhetorical realms. Last year I would have popped on Amazon and if the price was reasonable (less than $30) I'd add it to cart. But instead I checked the library first and voila. There it is in the History and Philosophy Library, exactly the place I need to go today to access Nassau Literary Magazine on microform.
So now I have a one-noun answer to that recurring question. Even despite the shockingly reduced hours during vacation times (when, ahem, faculty get the bulk of their research done), and despite terrifying movable stacks that will no doubt crush me or one of my dear colleagues someday, and despite the wildly ranging temperatures between the East and West stacks, particularly in the summer, and even despite the nattering circulation desk worker who can start a conversation based on the date of the due stamp, which when you think about it is actually pretty remarkable, our library rules.