A Dream About Libraries

What if you could live in one?

I haven’t had this dream in a long time, but there was a period of time when it was my recurring dream: I would be in a house that was my mother‘s house, except that it was not my actual mother‘s house. And it had a series of floors descending in a concentric set of circles like a cone. On each floor, there were many books and people, and those people were hanging out in the book stacks, or sleeping there, or reading. There were extremely impractical but beautiful ladders that ran from the top to the bottom or between the floors. This is how you got in and out. I love that in this dream people lived there.

I don’t know why I had the dream, why it returned to me so often, and then why it left. There was no anxiety associated with the dream, no obligation or stress. The cone descended for about 20 floors as I recall. But perhaps it is infinite. I like to think so.

I hadn’t thought of the dream in a long time. And then I saw the news that New York City Is moving ahead with a plan to build affordable housing at three different library sites after those libraries have been renovated. And it’s something of a tradition:

There used to be parties in the apartments on the top floors of New York City’s branch libraries. On other nights, when the libraries were closed, the kids who lived there might sit reading alone among the books or roll around on the wooden library carts...Their hopscotch courts were on the roof.

I thought again of how beautiful it would be to live at a library, even as I was reading this news article in my mother‘s actual house in Maine, where I am helping her pack for her move. Surrounded by her books, her actual books. No grand spirals of books here.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how I might retire someday, if I’m ever given the chance. I’ve been thinking of opening a literary hotel for about 20 years now and it grows and shrinks in my imagination several times a year. There would be suites named for favorite authors and the suite would be full of their books and their favorite books too, as named in interviews. You’d be able to read or buy them. Perhaps if they’re still alive we’d interview the writer ourselves. But of course this would just be an enormous exercise in procrastination.

I am getting a sabbatical now which feels like a preview of retirement. And one of my dreams, and by this I mean, plans, is to just read all year and of course, write. My office at the college has 40 shelves of books, and my home probably has at least that. And then there’s all the books that are not on shelves in either space, as if I am saving up for this library that I dreamed of so long ago.

A long time ago, my mother would have teacher meetings about me, and the teachers would say Alexander doesn’t live in the real world. And someday he’ll have to. And she would come home and say this, and I would say to her, no I don’t. Just like a child, the child I was. Because books are my way of living in the real world.

But I also want to travel. And perhaps I misunderstand the dream. What if it is not a library descending in concentric circles, but is instead a drill, some kind of ship made out of books that will bore down into the center of the Earth. A getaway vehicle that allows me to spend all my time reading, whether I’m home or not.

For now, I am helping my mom move. I am going to sleep near all the books I ever gave her as presents, almost like creating a secret stash at her house.

It’s been a little while since my last update. Great things and terrible things have happened. I sang the song I wrote about last time and satisfied my sense of myself, and emerged with the other singers at the Oldster Gen X night to a city cheering for the Knicks, basically the opposite of the time I wrote about that the song commemorated. I went to the Beacon Lit Fest and talked about fictional worlds, and taught at Queer Week in Ptown on the subject of writing the stories you’ve never seen. I saw a new to me kdrama and got to the part where one character asks the other to stay alive and wept, of course. More soon on all of this next time. Thanks for being here.